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a^

472-/^3

Mf^^^o

l^arliarli €olitst i^iiirars

FROM THE

FRANCIS PARKMAN
MEMORIAL FUND

WOK

CANADIAN HISTORY

Established in 1908

l^arliarti College i^ilirars

FROM THE

FRANCIS PARKMAN
MEMORIAL FUND

WOK

CANADIAN HISTORY

Established in 1908

TALPA;

OB, tHB

CHRONICLES OP A CLAY FARM!

* We shall learn of him another and a greater lesson, some day.'

-"J

TALPA: ^

Chronicles of a Clay Farm.

^n Agricultural Fragment.

- RIDENTEM DICERE VERUM.

THIRD EDITION.

LONDON :

LOVELL REEVE, HENRIETTA ST., COVENT GARDEN.

1854.

I-^rvaru College Library,

1? KANvJi tD ir AHKM AN '-
17 Ja,n-i804'

JOHK BDWABD TATLOE, PBIITTBB,
LITTia QTTXXK BTXSET, LINOOUr'iB IVJT Vn»l}S.

TO THE

READERS AND CONTRIBUTORS

OF THB

*®attienetg* (Kfjtanirie anti aflticttlttttal (Sajette*

THIS RECOLLECTION

OF SOME SCATTEBED ESSAYS OV PAST YBABS

BASED ON THE HOPE AND BELIEF

NOT UN0ONFIB3CED AT THSIB HANDS

THAT AGBICTTLTTTBAL THOTTOHT KAY BE CANDID

AND ETEN * SPBOTTLATIVE'

YET HITSBANDBY NOT THE LESS PBACTICAL

IS FINALLY INSCBIBED BY

THE AUTHOR.

** 'OvofMiTajv dvoiv fMp^jyfJ ftia."

CONTENTS.

[Jtnst SeriwO

I.

PAei

THE WASTE

1

11.

THE DBVIL-ON-THBBE-STIOKB .

8

> in.

A FBAOTICAIi BBOINimrO ....

. 13

IV.

A CONVBET,— AND A HEEBTIO .

. 20

V.

COMBIKATION AND OOMMINTmON .

. 27

VI.

CALX — ^AND BECALOITBATION .

. 36

vn.

BAETH-STOPPINO

. 4.2

Vlll.

•tETTTH at the BOTTOM OP a'— MAEL-PIT

. 49

IX.

PAMiOWS-— AND WHAT POLLOWS

. 58

X.

THEOBT AND PEAOTICB ....

. 67

XI.

DISSOLVING VIEWS

. 82

XII.

A WOED AT PASTING ....

. 87

Vm CONTENTS.

[.Seconli Series.]

XIII. . ,jLOB

*PAEa£ TO let' 98

XIV.
AN * application' 108

XV.

*LANDLOBD AND TENANT* .... 118

XVI.

LOW PEICES AND LONG PACES .... 127

xvn.

A * MATUTINAL HOXTE' 140

XVHL
'talpa' loquitue 150

XIX.

the *powees' -that be 164

XX.

THE PLAIN 'ENGLISH* OF IT . . 176

XXI.

THE * STEAM-CXTLTTVATOB' . .191

xxn.

THE SUBJECT CONTINUED .... 202

XXIII.
MACHINEET OP THE CLAYS . . .218

XXIV.

CONCLUSION 228

CHRONICLES OF A CLAY FARM,

[FIBST SEEIES.]

THE WASTE.

Much as may be learnt, by a willing mind, from
the wisdom of others, the most praxstical, and
(shame upon us!) the most attractive lessons
seem always to be derived from their failures.
It is too late, in the natural history of the
"biped without feathers that laughs," to stop
and inquire into this little item from the list of
his peculiarities ; so I shall take it for granted
in the most practical and amiable way in which
it can be at once assumed and applied; and,
like the self-deyoted bird that plucks its own
breast to feed the young brood, open up my
early fanning blunders to the instructiye gaze
of those young and ardent agriculturists who
are just beginning to recognize the last of human

t B

Z CHEONICLES OF A CLAY FAEM.

Sciences in the first of human Arts, and to "only-
wish, like duteous sons, their parents were more
wise."

I shall not tell when it was, nor where it was,
nor why it was, that I first * broke ground* : the
first would be too cruel, the second too particular,
and the third too personal. But I shall describe
my Farm geologically, and myself categorically,
which must answer every proper inquiry of the
curious, and will leave a little untold besides,
the better to keep alive the interest of the narra-
tive.

Somewhere or other in England there is a flat
bleak high-lying district, which a shallow or very
terse geologist might haply describe as part of
the New-red-sand-stone formation ; but where, if
he would take the trouble to plough an acre, he
would hear now and then a suspicious kind of
sound from the shore and coulter, which I may
describe by the word * soapy ; ' and where, when-
ever the nose of the plough chanced to dive an
inch deeper than usual, he would see certain
blue-looking indications turned up, that would
rather startle his complacency, if a lover of light
soils, by a suggestion of the proximity of that
terrible antagonist — ^the blue Lias. Should this
discovery stimulate farther exploration, and his

THB WASTE. 6

plough be set a couple of inches deeper, his ears
might presently be regaled with a sound aa of a
heavy-laden cart dragging over a newly-graveUed
road; and after turning ijp a variety of con-
glomerates, as compacted as the bed of an old
Eoman causeway, and as many-coloured as Har-
lequin's coat, the stress of the pull would sud-
denly be eased, and the plough be heard swim-
ming whisperingly through a bed of wet sand ;
and just as the filler-horse was congratulating
himself that it was all plain sailing now, bang
goes a trace or a spreader, and the plough comes
to a standstiQ, just revealing, at the share-point,
the bruised side of a quartz pebble as big as a
foot-baU grinning at you from its tight nook in
the bed of the fiirrow.

Have I described enough? or shall I add, to
this subsoil sketch, a faint and feeble idea of
the surface, some time about the month of Feb-
ruary (sumamed * fill-dyke ' not without reason) ;
and endeavour to paint the hopeless, currentless,
resourceless, and pitiable condition of water,
whose unhappy fate has fallen, or melted, upon
fields as flat as a billiard-table, and without even
a * pocket* to run into for escape or concealment P
There it would stand, day after day, and week
after week, and month after month, shining

4 CHBONICLBS OF A CLAY 7ABM.

along the serpentine furrows, as if it never,
never, never would go again! And the only-
wonder was when or how, or by what bold am-
phibious being the ridges had ever been raised,
which it intersected, like a sample series of Dutch
canals and embankments.

This was my Farm : 250 statute acres !

" Why did you take it ? "

I didn't. It took me. That * mysterious lady*
who is painted with a bandage on her eyes, (she
can see as well as you or I,) made it, with a pat
on the back, my property, and shortly after-
wards, with a slap in the face, my * occupation.*
It had been performing for a series of years a
sort of * geometrical progression* — downwards.
Each incoming tenant took it at about half the
previous rent ; dabbled about for a year or two
like a duck, and retired— '^<w»e.* It was but a
simple equation — a very simple one— to say
when the rent would come to zero. It looked
on the Bental-book like an annual sum in Ee-
duction ; facilis descensus Avemi, literally trans-
lated into plain English. What was to be done
with itP This brings me to my proposition l^o,
2 : which is in fact what is conmionly called 'No,
V — ^myself. If there was in the catalogue of
human pursidts, one which I hated and feared,

THE WASTB. 5

dreaded and despised, didn't know, and didn't
wish to know — ^it was that strange incompre-
hensible infatuated damaging thing which from
my cradle upwards I had heard described and
deprecated imder the almost forbidden name of
—Farming. Dr. Johnson calls it the delight of
destiny to counterchange the plans and purposes
of man ; but some other wise man, I think it is
Lord Bacon, tells us to 'choose the life that is
most useM, and habit will make it the most
agreeable.' But accident seems more potent
than destiny, plan, purpose, choice, or habit.
On a long sea-voyage, and in a rather resource-
less foreign land, a couple of unbidden com-
panions had stuck by me with persecuting ten-
acity, and attracted first my acquaintance, then
my intimacy, for sheer want of anything else :
they were two books : to wit, Cobbett's edition
of Tull's Works, and the Useful-Knowledge So-
ciety's volumes on British Husbandry. I read
them, and re-read them ; and then began again :
for nine mortal months I was reduced to gorge
my literary appetite upon these husks, as I at
first regarded them. The Georgics of Virgil had
begun and ended all my previous acquaintance
with farmiug ; they were the sole associating tie
that connected me with this sudden and enforced

6 CHEONICLES OF A CLAY FAEM.

onslaught upon the * theory and practice of Agri-
culture/ and I returned to England — ^poor wretch,
— in worse condition than I went — in fact given
up by the * Faculty* as a confirmed — Book-farmer.
With this morbid predisposition upon me —
imagine me exposed unexpectedly to the fatal
atmosphere of a sick-room in which lay a dying
man, as he devoutly believed, — a land-steward —
stricken with influenza, caught upon my marsh :
imagine the reports, the lectures, the death-bed
warnings I had to sit and listen to, about this
blessed farm ! He described it as you would a
pestilence ; a terror to all around it ; it must be
cured, not for its own sake, but as you would
treat a rotten sheep, or a truss of mouldy hay.
It was painful, yet ludicrous, to hear him, for he
talked like a dying man of a bad child — that
would "be sure to come to harm some day or
other." What on earth was to be done P Agri-
culture was not royal then — there was no 'So-
ciety's Journal,' no motto-laden buttons publish-
ing the banns (for the first time) of "Peacticb
with Science" no dear little weekly bonne bouche
of a Gazette, no July gathering of fat cattle and
great men to look backward and forward to,
during the other months. All waa duU, blank,
and cheerless, not to say " flat and unprofitable."

THB WASTE. 7

Wliat WBS to be done P apostatize from all the
promises and tows made from my youth, up, and
take it in hand — ^that is, in a bailiff's hand, which
certain foregone experiences had led me to con-
ceive was of all things in the world the most out
of hand, if that may be called so which empties
the hand and the pocket too ! Such seemed the
only alternative : at first it was an impossibility
— ^then an improbability — and then, — as the ear
of bearded corn wins its forbidden way up the
schoolboy's sleeve, and gains a point in advance
by every effort to stop or expel it, so did every
determination, every reflection counteract the
very purpose it was summoned to oppose, and,
in short, one fine morning I almost jumped a
yard backward at seeing — ^my own name on a
wagon!

n.

THE 'DEVIL-ON-riSrRJEr^-STICKS/

These is an old saying that 'Fools build Houses
for wise men to live in,' a proverb which, whether
applicable or not to Farms as well as houses,
probably receives about as fair an average of di-
rect verification in the course of each man's indi-
vidual experience, as any other of thdse mys-
terious morsels of traditional truth which are
handed down from each generation to its suc-
cessor, like faery money. Gold in the giver's.
Dust in the receiver's hand. The young experi-
mentalist in brick-and-mortar, with a shake of
the head not unworthy of the Elizabethan states-
man whose posthumous fame has owed so much
to that outward symptom of plethoric wisdom,
admits the general and antecedent truth of the
motto which might be scrolled up over so many
a splendid door-way : he does not doubt or deny
it, not he ! it is not to disprove its general, but to

THE 'DEVIL-ON-THBEE-8T1CK8.* 9

pony its particular application that he purposes :
it is not to inyalidate the truth of the rule as
against man, but to prove it by an exception, in
the case of one individual of the species that he
knows of. And the clear rectangular pencil- work,
and the softening shades of the brush of the ac-
oompHshed artist-architect do their work upon
his eyes, like Vanity reflected in a mirror, as he
beholds (on pasteboard) the 'Splendid Eleva-
tion,* and then reads with delight in one comer
of the sketch, beautiMly printed in Indian ink,
the 'exceedingly moderate Estimate* Such is
"the taper that has lighted fools" each on his
solitary track out of the beaten high-road of old
Experience, leading them on by the marsh-light
hope of individual exemption from the Common
Lot. And old men shake their heads and only
smile, at the sallies of youthfol arrogance that
rise and break in succession upon the shore of
life, and need no reproach but that which their
own sure ebb witf bring with it.
And so they felt, and so they looked on me,

in the autumn of no, I dare not say how

long ago ! — ^when the arrival of load after load
of Draining-tiles gave parish notice of the at-
tempt to drain what Antiquity had pronounced
ondrainable, since the Deluge.

10 CHEONICLBS OP A CLAY TAEM.

But why can't it be drained P asked Green-
horns.

Because there's no Fall I replied collective
Wisdom.

Has it ever been tried with a Spirit-level P

Now this was not a fair question. Spirit-levels
(if they had any meaning or existence at all)
were unintelligible mathematical-looking instru-
ments of purely professional nature, only seen
(if ever) in the hands of road-surveyors* assistants
and people of that sort. They had nothing what-
ever to do with farming. The question was un-
fair : it contained an ambiguous term.

Picture to yourself, however, the following con-
clusion from it. A bleak foggy November day :
a long rambling space, marsh or meadow, as you
might choose to call it, of some twenty acres in
extent, and about the third part of a nule in
length, with a narrow thick plantation of rushes,
sedges, and brooklime, and such aquatic vegeta-
tion, threading its way in one long dank line
from end to end, by such fantastic meanderings,
that it looked as if the hidden channel of choked
moisture it concealed had been making a con-
tinued series of experiments from time out of
mind in search of an outlet ; and after centuries
of struggle and disappointment, had at length

THE * DBVIL-ON-THEBE-STICKS/ 11

arriTed quite by accident at a certain point at
one end of the meadow, — ^where you might see a
pair of high mud boots standing, or rather soak-
ing, with a man in them, peering through a
telescope on three legs, as if he was watching for
the total eclipse of a small boy that is to be seen
— gradually sinking — about fifty yards off, and
clutching in his agony a tall staff by his side,
figured as if for high and low water-mark.

Presently the Boots and the Telescope, after
various ineffectual efforts and heavings, succeed
in striking their quarters; the boy, after simdry
spasmodic struggles, to correspond, achieves the
same exploit ; and the same scene as before oc-
curs again some fifty yards further on, and again,
and again, at the same intervals, until they reach
the other end of the meadow, and come plump
upon the banks of a marshy Pool some six acres
in extent. On attaining this point, the telescope
IS suddenly shut up with a triumphant snap ; its
three legs jump into one ; the dripping shivering
boy receives a tremendous involuntary thwack
on the back, and a Fall of Nine Feet is de-
dared, — ^like a ' Dividend of ten per cent, and a
Balance over to go on with ! *

Oh you primeval Carp, Pike, and Eels ! you
little thought on that day how deadly a fishing-

12 CHSONICLBB OF A CLAY FABM.

rod, marked and measured inch by inch, threw
its shadow across your ancient domain; little
did your beheved security dream of so neyr a
monster, the angler upon three legs, that luul
measured the altitude of your dowhfall, and
caught you all, if not upon one, upon two cross
hairs.

Old Fish or a New Farm P Snipes or Swede-
turnips P Which was it to beP There stood
but this question between the will and the w&j
to let the Dry Land appear. And who knows
what Saurian monstrosities of a primeval age
might be brought into daylight when this stag-
nation of waters waa let loose, which had dam-
med up the moisture of so many broad acres firom
time immemorial P since, Httle raised above the
high water-mark of this pool, lay the subsoil of
the whole farm beyond and around it ; and the
lowest point of this meadow was the lowest point
of aU.

ni.

A 'PEACTICAL' BEGINNING.

It was urged by Mr. Brunei as a justification for
more attention and expense in laying the rails
of the Great Western, than had been ever thought
of upon previously constructed lines, that all the
embankments and cuttings and earth-works and
stations and law and parliamentary expenses-—
in fact the whole of the outlay encoimtered in
the formation of a Bailwaj, had for its main and
ultimate object a perfectly smooth and level line
of MAIL; that to turn stingy at this point, just
when you had arrived at the great 'ultimatis-
simum' of the whole proceedings, viz. the Iron
Wheel-track, was a sort of saving which evinced
a waixt of perception of the true object of all
the labour that had preceded it. It may seem
carious to our experiences, in these days, that
such a doctrine could ever have needed to be
enforced by argument; yet no one will deem it

14 CHB0N1CLE8 OP A CLAY FABM.

wonderful who has personally witnessed the un-
accountable and ever new difficulty of getting
proper attention paid to the levelling of the
bottom of a drain, and the laying of the tiles in
that continuous line, where one single depression
or irregularity, by collecting the water at that
spot year after year, tends towards the eventual
stoppage of the whole drain, through two dis-
tinct causes, the softening of the foundation un-
derneath the sole, or tile flange, and the deposit
of soil inside the tile from the water collected
at the spot, and standing there aft^r the rest has
run off. Every depression, however slight, is
constantly doing this mischief in every drain
where the fall is but trifling ; and if to the two
consequences above-mentioned, we may add the
decomposition of the tile itself by the action of
water long stagnant within it, we may deduce
that every tile-drain laid with these imperfec-
tions in the finishing of the bottom, has a ten-
dency towards obliteration, out of all reasonable
proportion with that of a weU-bumt tile laid on
a perfectly even inclination, which, humanly
speaking, may be called a permanent thing. An
open ditch cut by the most skilful workman, in
the Summer, affords the best illustration of
this underground mischief. !N'othing can look

A 'PBACTICAL* BEGINNING. 15

smoother and more even than the bottom, till
that uncompromising test of accurate levels, the
water, makes its appearance : all on a sudden
the whole scene is changed, the eye-accredited
level vanishes as if some earthquake had taken
place : here there is a gravelly Scov/r along which
the stream rushes in a thousand little angry-
looking ripples ; there it hangs and looks as
didl and heavy as if it had given up running at
all, as a useless waste of energy; in another place
a few dead leaves or sticks, or a morsel of soil
broken from the side, dams back the water for
a considerable distance, occasioning a deposit of
soil along the whole reach, greater in proportion
to the quantity and the muddiness of the water
detained. All this shows the paramount import-
ance of perfect evenness in the bed on which the
tiles are laid. The worst-laid tile is the measwre
of the goodimess and permanence of the whole
drain, just as the weakest link of a chain is the
measure of its strength.

But this of course was all theory, and theory
of course was all nonsense: my practical head-
drainer was quite of a different way of thinking,
as his modus operandi will exhibit. The morn-
ing after he had commenced operations I found
hiTn hard at work cutting a drain about eighteen

16 CHBONICLBS OF A CLAY FABM.

inches deep, laying in the tiles one hy one, and
filling in the earth over them as he went !

The field I had began npon was large, and
tery flat; and in order to increase artificiallj
the fall, I had calculated so as to make the
drain eighteen inches deeper at the mouth than
at the tail. I might as well have calculated the
distance of a telescopic star.

"Fve been a-draining this forty year and more
— / ought to know summut about it /"

Need I tell you who said this P or give you the
whole of the colloquy to which it furnished the
epilogue P

I had begun, something in this way—" Why,
my good friend ! what on earth are you about?
Did'nt I tell you to lay the drain open from bot-
tom to top, and that not a tile was to be put in
till I had seen it, and tried the levels P" &c., &c.

Old as Adam— old as Adam was the whole
dialogue— it is idle to go through it — Conceit
verstis Prejudice— the ignorance of the young
against the ignorance of the old — the thing that
has been, and will be, as long as "the sun and
the moon endureth." It ended as I have said.

"I've been a-draining this forty year and more
— I ought to know summut about it !"

Here was a staggerer. Amongst aU my cal-

A *pbactical' beginning. 17

eolations to think that I should never have cal-
culated on this ! I had seen the commander of
a noble steamer with one parenthetical point of
his forefinger (caught in an instant by the helms-
man) veer round a ship of a thousand tons bur-
then ; I had seen the practical astronomer, with
an infinitesimal touch of the directing screw of
the telescope, bend his searching gaze millions
of miles away from its first position; I had seen
the mill-owner, with half a nod. to his foreman,
stop in an instant the hurly-burly of a thousand
wheels while he explained to me, in comparative
quiet, some little matter of new invention in the
carding of the rough wool, or the rounding and
hardening of the finished Twist. I had seen
enough of the empire of Mind over Matter in
many forms and shapes, by sea and land, to
make me the devoutest of believers in modem
miracle. Under the quiet seductive brightness
of the midnight lamp, I had revelled in the
mysteries of Number and of Form; and in the
working realities of daylight I had seen and
stood witness to the application of those appar^
ent mysteries to the most beautifully simple pro-
cesses in the production of ordinary and imiver-
sal articles of human want. It had ftimished
me no new or difOumlt gratification to level and

c

18 CHSOiriCLSS OF A CLAY FABX.

calculate to an inch, the amount of Fall to be
obtained upon a field, which without this pre*
caution might indeed be called, as it had been
called, tmdrainable; and here I was, fairly
planted, at the first onset. Eyery inch of depth
was of real value at the mouth of so long a line
of drain. '' Three feet deep at the outlet " was
the modest extent of my demand ; and there I
stood, watching the tiles thrown in pMe-mMe to
a depth of eighteen inches, which I was giren to
understand was 'about two feet,' with as cool
an indifference to the other foot, as if Two and
Three had been recently determined by the com-
mon assent of manMnd to mean the same thing.

* But I must haye it three feet deep!'

' Oh it's no use : itll nerer drain so dip as
that through this here clay V

'But I tell you it must he I There can be
no fall without it.'

'Well, IVe been a-draining this forty year
and I ought to know summut about it.'

From that moment I date my experience in
the trials and troubles of farming : at that in-
stant my eyes began to open to the true meaning
of those 'practical difficulties' which the imini-
tiated laugh at because they have never encoun-
tered them ; and which the man of science de-

A 'fbactical' BBGiiririirG. 19

spiseswhohaaBaid to steam, water, and machinery,
* do this,' and they do it, but has never known
what it is to try and guide out of the old track,
a mind that has run in the same rut " this forty
year and more."

IV.

A CONVEET,— AND A HEEETIC.

Wb have heard — and a little oftener than is
pleasant, — of victories gained in the Field and
lost in the Cabinet. The civil war that has
waged so long, between the partisans of the
deep and of the shallow drain presents an ex-
perience the converse of this. Long after peace
had been proclaimed — ^upon paper — and most of
the printed authorities had begun to pull to-
gether in favour of the deep drain — I say mosty
for even to this day a parting shot is now and
then heard for the old system ; — ^long after the
shallow advocates had written themselves round
to the other side, the battle was still waging
fiercely out-of-doors. Truly may the Draining-
tile be said to have " fought its way downwards
inch by inch." The benefit derived even firom a
drain eighteen or twenty inches deep under the
furrow which was still retained, was so manifest

A CONVEBT, — Am> A HEBBTIC. 21

and immediate, that the very improvement itself
prevented fhrther improvement. A man who
had shallow-drained one field, and found that
even this did good, imagined himself furnished
with a practical argument against deep draining
though he had never tried it; like those who
condemn books they have never read, on the
authority of opposite-thinking Eeviews which
they have read.

This was precisely the sort of reasoning that
lay fast and strong in the skull of my old master-
drainer ; for master I saw he was determined to
be. The evidence of a hundred Spirit-levels
would have been no answer to 'forty years'
experience* in draining and ditching. Of this
I was quite sure : so we were at a dead pass.
One or the other must give way * and be for
ever fallen.' It was easy to wish him forty
years' more experience — elsewhere-^ajidL 'good
morning;' but this would be only cutting the
knot, and probably entailing another in succes-
sion. Nee deus intersit nisi dignus vindice
nodus ! He was a good workman, and his au-
thority over his men not a thing that it would
bo wise to shake, even had that been possible.
A thought occurred to me, a very bold thought,
all things considered. I knew he hated the sight

22 CHBOfriCLBS OF A CLAY FABM.

of the Zmw^that; cimotis*looking thing on three
sticks,— worse than the old gentleman that walks
upon two. What if I oonld reconcile iiiese two
great opposing anthorities by one timely stroke
— 4nake him Master-of-arts on the spot, before
the eyes of all his menP Shorter and less earned '
degrees have been taken in the world. The op-
portnnity was irresistible. I had it bionght;
adjusted it; and told him to look throngh it
and giye me hie opinion of the Fall. If yon
eyer saw a dog pnt his nose to a wasps* nest,
you may form some idea of the mistrostM curi-
osity and hesitating aversion with which he
brought his face into dose contact with his arch-
enemy.

A long indescribable process ensued; a most
determined effort to dose the l^fb eye with the
right hand— *then the right eye with the left hand
—'then a dead stillness^ and a long fumbling
breathless view of the world tomed updde down,
and his men standing on their heads for the fint
time, in spite of the forty years' experience to
Ihe contrary: and then----

" Well I don't know but whd yonWe right.
Sir : the Pall does want a leede eadng at the
bottom r

The success was complete. In half an hour

A. COKYEBT, — ^AVD A HSBBTIC. 23

erery tile was uncoyered. The men worked as
men work who feel justly proud of their com-
mander : he had arrived at the highest summit
of his profession. He returned to them wi1&
doubled authoriiy and importance; and the
drainage of my first field was soon accom-
plished : not as deeply indeed — b» we now cail
deeply ; but deep enough, after the ridges had
been twice cast, to allow "ExaHl and Andrews'
subsoiler to follow the cross-ploughing a y^ar
afterwards, and break to pieces as obdurate n
hearthpan as ever resisted the root of an oak.

'After the ridges had been twice east:' how
easy it looks in print! What a pretty little
Example-farm would England — and what would
not Ireland be, — ^if the Press could thus cultirate
and ciyilize! — ^if ploughs were printers' types and
fields were paper— if bogs and fens and marshes
could be drained like inkpots, and every drop
that falls from Heaven — ^firom which there falls
not one drop— no I not one dbof— too much
or too little— were apportioned to its proper
place and task. It falls upon its ^proper place^
and imder that place lies its task, would but
Man believe and act upon the hint, and do his
part, his gloriously privileged part, in carrying
out, for his own benefit, the purposes of perfect

24 CHBONICLES OF A CLAY FABM.

Wisdom, — ^the indications of an ever-suggestiye
Handy-work.

* After the ridges had been twice cast '! Why,
those seven words that lie so smooth on paper,
cost me three times seven months of single-
handed fighting against the * Experience * of a
whole neighbourhood. No hawk in a rookeiy
ever got better beleaguered. "One down;
'tother come on !" was the one perpetual motto
of the tongue-task that awaited me, fresh and
fresh on every side, whichever way I turned.
My own working-bailiff (et Tu, Brute!) headed
the attack within the camp — ^the traitor ! while
a neighbouring clergyman led on the foe from
without, evidently viewing the heresy in a seri-
ous light, and myself as a fit subject for an auto
dafd. The conclusion of our last skirmish was
too good to be lost to posterity. I entered it
verbatim in my farm memoranda. Here it is.

* But tell me in earnest. Don't you mean to
ridge up that field again V

'Nor

* What, you mean to lay it^a^ V
'YesT

* In the name of Goodness ! Why P*

* Because the name of Goodness — made it

A CONVEBT, — ±VJ> A HBBETIC. 25

J£ I had suddenly asstuned some demoniacal
form, and then, leaving a train of smoke and
brimstone, vanished, with a clap of thunder, from
before the eyes of my catechist, I do not think
his face would have assumed a greater expression
of resourceless and complete astonishment than
followed this extraordinary announcement of the
reason for a farming operation. Vainly had I
attempted to explain in former conversations
that when a field is eflfectually drained, the fwr-
rows are underground, three feet deep ; and that
one of the great objects of breaking the subsoil
is to enable the water to go where it was intended
to go, DOWNWAEDS ; that every unevenness of
the surface was a source of deviation, and there-
fore of unequal distribution, of that rich food
which falls from Heaven, — Oxygen and Hydro-
gen, — commonly called Watee : that on the best
land farmed in the best way,i^irrows are avoided
as a nuisance and a loss, except as a mark for
measure-work; and that the object of draining
and subsoiling was — as the object of all Art is—
to imitate Natuee in her most perfect examples.

The paradox of yesterday is the truism of to-
day. Gas-lamps light up towns and Great-
Westerns cross the Atlantic, though Davy
laughed at the one and Lardner at the other.

26 CHBOiriCLBS OF A. CLAY FABM.

And the principle of the Deep drain^ which ten
years ago the timid theorist dared not assert, for
its wild and yisionary seeming, is now the snb-
stance of the ' Eeport of a Committee,' the last
tautology of admitted facts that men endure, and
haying consigned to the charnel-house of the
Blue Books, inscribe its epitaph in an Act of
Parliament.

COMBINATION AND COMMINUTION.

Thebb are some incidental points of practice at-
tendant upon the drainage of a field, which giye
very little uneasiness to a beginner, but which,
like many of the other realities of life, gain force
with further experience. A blessed thing in its
way is the untamed boldness of Youth. It geU
done many things in this cautious calculating
old world, which if not done then, would never
be done at aJl, and which, whether useM for
their striking goodness, or for their striking bad*
ness, afibrd equally profitable employment to that
large and self-respected portion of the commu-
nity whose business and pleasure lie in content-
edly criticizing the errors that others ha/oe made,
in the charitable spirit of

*' the fiend who never spoke before^
But cries * I wam*d you,' when the deed is o*er."

One of the points referred to, first presented

28 CHRONICLES OF A CLAY FARM.

itself to the notice of the Chronicler, in this
wise: —

* A queer lot this, Sir !*

'Well, it 18 queer,* replied I, as the drainer
threw out first a lump of blue clay, then a lump
of red, then a horrible spadeful of white, then a
dripping mass of yellow sand, then a kind of
grey gravelly conglomerate, that had puzzled the
very pickaxe whose delicate style of dissection
had been brought to bear upon it, then a few
spadefuls of beautifully-veined red marl, and then
broke into a carboniferous-looking bed of black
peat, — and then — ^but let the old drainer christen
it, for my heterology is exhausted.

* A QuEEB Lot, this, Sir ! What shall I do
with itP*

I stood for a moment dramatically silent,
working up my courage to a great effort. Out
it came at last.

* Let it be spread over the land !*

— He was just raising his face to look up in
mine. I knew what was coming ; I caught one
sight of his mouth screwing into an agony of
contortion, as the idea loomed painfully, by de-
grees, upon his perceptions. I waited for no
more, but turned quietly round, trying to stifle
a fit of inward laughter — ^not at ^ly own words,

COMBINATION AND COMMINtTTION. 29

but at the effect I knew they were producing ;
and walked away. I turned once only, and saw
him leaning on his spade, and looking after me.
I can give you his soliloquy, for it was written
upon his attitude, like the lettering of a picture.
* Well !—If that don't beat everything !'
A blessed thing, in its way, I say again, is the
imtamed boldness of youth. There was not a
full-grown * practical farmer' within a ten mile
circuit of the spot where the old drainer stood
on that day, rapt in severe amazement, who
would not have thought it as much as his fair
fame was worth to give that order. Nothing
but the inconceivable daring of pure unmitigated
Theoky would have ventured its character upon
such a throw. Now for the explanation.

Upon all wet thin cold clay soils, the wisdom
of antiquity has long established that you are
only to plough three or four inches deep ; that
you are to ridge up your lands into a certain
round-backed shape which the rain may run off,
as it would from an umbrella, or the roof of a
house; that you are never to cross-plough, or
otherwise disturb this consecrated form into
which the earth's surface has been once-for-all
moulded, but to keep scratching it, up and down,
shallow enough to insv/re a seed-time by having a

30 CHBONICLBS 07 A CLAY 7ABM.

dry surface two inches deep, leaving the fonow,
and about a yard on each side of it, as the per-
petual channel or bed for water or ice in the
winter, and baked sterility in the summer ; Ihat
if anybody dares to mention to you anything
about that mysterious abomination called the
SUBSOIL, you are to screw up your mouth, shake
your head and say

* It won*t do to bring up that nasty stuff!*

* But don't Gardeners do it sometimes P' I one
day ventured to ask, with child-like simplicity,
in reply to the established doctriue.

' That's a different thing : Gtu^deners aren't
" practical farmers*" *

*But don't THB BOOTS OF PLANTS GBOW DOWK-

WABDS in a Field, as weU as in a Garden P'

I don't know how it was, but that provoking
question always brought the conyersation to an
abrupt close. I never could get beyond it. It
stuck in my own throat and everybody's else,
like Macbeth's Amen, Lefb alone at last to my
own ignorance, I dropped deeper and deeper,
day after day, into a state of confirmed Theory.
r got strange notions into my head, that, as two
negatives make an affirmative, perhaps two bad
soils might make one good one, and three bad
soils a better still, and four bad ones the best

COKBINATIOK JlND COUKIKTTTIOir. 31

of all ! and when I saw the old drainer throwing
out those lumps of manj-coloiired Clay, and
Sand, and Gravel, and Peat, it was really too
mnch for me. The monomania was irresistible :
and the old feUow must have known it ; for at
the yery moment when the paroxysm was at its
height— jnst when the extravagant thought was
flashing across me that though everybody de-
clared ncm, con. that it was bad, Some Onb had
pronounced it Good— just at that very moment
of weak hallucination, the old Lucifer, smacking
his lips in an odd way of his own, looked up
temptingly in my &ce, with his question, 'A
queer lot. Sir! What rfiall I do mtk itr

Blue and red, yellow and grey, white and
black, stiff and loose, gritty and waxy, cohesive
and repellent, soft and hard^^-there it lay before
my eyes, my precious subsoil in all its Protean
variety of colour, texture, and consistency; there
lay the rascally substratum that had pulled down
strong men one after another who had tried to
grow crops over it, exposed at last and brought
to daylight like an unearthed fox; there it lay,
dripping away its long pent-up moisture down the
narrow channel that led to the newly opened
outlet, through that same long meadow afore-
time celebrated in this Chronicle; reminding

6Z CHRONICLES OF A CLAY FABM.

one of a fallen foe bleeding out life and miscliief
at last and for ever. The impulse of pent-up
theory was irresistible. * Let it be spread over
the land !'

And so it was. And a very curious-looking
field it made for the livelong winter that ensued.
Wise men came from all the quarters of the
compass to look at it. Some of their remarks
and questions were very flattering. "Where
had I purchased my Winter top-d/ressing ? as
they should like to buy some at the same shop,
whatever the cost." " What winter crop was I
growing so carefdUy under the variegated car*
pet V* To aU which I answered with becoming
gravity, and modesty of my own merit. Some
of the remarks being of a more mysterious
character, I entered in my Farm Journal for
^ture explanation and experience ; such for in-
stance as that of an old gentleman who shut-
ting one eye, (I suppose it was a habit,) told
me with great blandness of manner that I had
**put my foot in it,** (What could he meanP)
Another was so full of general good wishes that
he ** wished I might get it " more than once ;
which I thought all the more good-natured as he
did not even stay to particularize what crop he
alluded to, or how much per acre. But of course

COMBINATION AND COMMINUTION. 33

I civilly 'wished him the same,' gently shutting
one eye, as I saw it was the fashion, and had
such a pleasing effect : at which, being an old
friend, he performed the ceremony of inserting
his second finger between the fourth and fifth
rib of my left side, and informed me, with a
snule, that "he saw I understood chaffy* to
which innocently replying in the affirmative, I
added, for reason, that I had a great demand for
it of late amongst my friendsy and found it an
useful commodity in farming. Such are the
dark and recondite passages presented by my
journal of that winter, which I offer for the in-
formation and guidance of all those who may
purpose trying novel experiments unsanctioned
by the established practice of their respective
neighbourhoods; merely noting that there are
some things besides the soil, on this earth, which
require a little temperingy and pay well to a
man's peace of mind for being done quietly and
neatly, without haste or heat, — yet smartly
withal.

Spring came at last : beautiful Spring ! that
fills the old heart with youth, and softens down
to a more genial and hopeful tone the ftrosts
and snows that reign within, as without, through
dreary winter. Certain reports respecting the

34 CHRONICLES OF A CLAY FABH.

field which had been drained, and so curionsly
* top-dressed,* had from time to time altered the
current of opinion that had hitherto ran so
strongly all one way. The nnderwagoner had
told somebody in strict confidence that the snow
had disappeared on that field two days sooner
than from any other. This had been repeated
in equal confidence from mouth to mouth, with
the addition that all the clay had 'kicked down
to ashes;' but what topped everything was that
before even Bean-sowing had begun, the * motley
close ' was reported * as dry as a bone *!

The Harrow is certainly not the most ingenious
or perfect of agricultural implements ; but never
was a more surprising feat performed by any,
than was witnessed one fine morning early in
March, when it was ordered over the field afore-
mentioned! Down went the clay, sand, peat,
and everything else, —

" Black spirits and white,
Blue spirits and grey,
Mingle, mingle, mingle,
Ye that mingle may!"

And 'mingle* in truth they did, into as free
healthy-looking a soil, as fresh and as mellow
as if it had never lain underground or been out
of the sunshine. With every turn of the horses.

COMBINATION AND COMMINUTION. 35

better and better it looked and worked. An
increasing elasticity of movement seemed to per-
vade men, horses, barrows, soil, and even the
very atmosphere of the field. Before the Work
was half done, Thboey and The Chronicle were
at a premium.

VI.

' CALX '—AND EECALCITEATION.

A LONG long time — ^what a dreary time — ia Win-
ter ! Well may all Christendom have lent its
comfortable efforts through ages past, with a
long and a strong pull and a pull altogether, to
give a point and a zest, and a time of abnost
legislated conviviality, in the Christmas fire-side
and goodfeUowship, by way of in-door barricade,
a sort of jovial rebellion, against the long de-
spotism of Jack Frost ! It is hard to convey an
adequate idea of the bounding pleasxire with
which — after watching, month after month un-
changed, the rugged uncouth results of that
novel piece of autumn workmanship lately de-
scribed — I saw at last the wholesome-looking
combination of such a heterogeneous variety of
earths that had lain icebound, as if for perpetual
and stereotyped ugliness, now melting down
under the genial influences of Spring, and that

*CALX' — AND BSCALCITBATIOK. 87

blessed pair of harrows, into what old Evelyn
must have especially had in his eye when he
talked of * a roscid and fertile monld.'

' Easy work it is to preach about farming ex-
periments/ thought I to myself, as I wandered
in the gloomy evenings of December and Ja-
nuary, amongst the square clods that lay ex-
humed upon the surface of the field, with the
spade-mark inscribed in frozen obduracy upon
their sides, like the blocks in the quarries of
Syracuse dated with the tool marks of twenty
centuries ago ! ' Easy work to preach experi-
mentSi that take a year to make, and another
to judge of, and another and perhaps another
still, to see the whole result of, — ^to men whose
" threescore years and ten*' were hardly a suffi-
cient Lease in which to scrape together a dozen
facts beyond what their fathers knew!* A pretty
homily upon Leases there lies in these clods
that have been keeping sentry here these three
months, while the Manufacturer has worn a
steam-engine from new to old, and the Trader
has tamed over half his capital, and briskly put
in a fresh stock of ' Spring Fashions.* In the
name of Common Sense, that usefrd 'raw ma-
terial * which England has as plentiM as Coal
and Lron, — what dead carcase has been chained

38 CHBONICLSS OF A CLAY FABH.

to this living Art of Arts to clog its progress
and to rot its vital powers, by adding the curse
of Insecueitt of Tenueb to its already ar-
duous and time-and-patience-needing problems I
If it be Mind that acts upon Matter, what is
it that acts upon MindP Surely Motive and
Intebest, and that Asstjbakce of Eesults,
which the most ordinary prudence demands, and
the most buoyant energy feeds upon — or dies.

Well may a bold experiment startle minds
which have been drilled into the habit, because
into the necessity, of contracting every prospect,
every outlay, every mental conception, within
the compass of an * Agreement for a year !' If
there is an attribute which more than others
marks the distinction of the human mind, from
that of the lower animal creation, it is that it
looks forward: if there is an art that more
than others demands the powerM and pro-
longed exercise of this faculty, it is agricul-
ture: if there is a thing which adds force and
method and precision to this faculty, it is —
Education. Does the pen need to draw the
conclusion P Can the reader of 'Sermons in
Stones* decipher no Leases in Chds, no Schools
of instruction in "Calx, Silex, and Alumen P"

Winter however, like Adversity, has a sur-

*CALX* — AJUD BBCALCITBATIOK. 39

priflingly improving influence upon things

made of Clatf, As each little thaw, towards
spring-time, came and went, the gradual process
of granulation had broken down the once wet
and reeking spadefuls into the form of dry loose
Mole-heaps, As the tines of the harrow jumped
and danced freely through the mingling mass,
what a changed appearance was left behind ! a
dry rich earthy scent, sweeter than the breath
of an Orange-grove, or the evening incense of
the hay-field, rose gratefully up to meet the
fresh morning beams that shot their influence
for the first time on the new face of an old field;
the busy gossamer drew its glittering net-work
from point to point in a thousand geometrical
fonns over the levelled surface.

'Well! I never thought to see it look like
this ! I should think anything would grow here !*

Such was the remark I overheard. I suppose
it came from one of the horses ; they were the
only living things present that were not pledged
to an opposite opinion. The observation, how-
ever, if ill-fitting was not ill-timed : it chimed
in with the thoughts that were tumbling over each
other in theoretical confusion through the brain
of the incurable Chronicler. What would have
been thought of him had he dared to utter

40 CHBONICLES OF A CLAY FABM.

them aloud, as they came and went in this
strange fashion —

'The PEOTOxiDE into the peeoxide! ha! a

* beautiftd change that. Clay, Sand, Peat, — and

* Marl too ! a goodly compound. How is it that

* a sort of instinct seems to anticipate the con-

* elusions of Science — that the mind outstrips
' the page, and one's assent to each proposi-

* tion seems paid in advance, before it falls strictly

* due ? Is science intuitive ? then why is it

* MODEEN? Why have centuries upon centuries

* — sixtif centuries — ^passed, and none till now !

* Why NOW P Could Liebig answer that ? I'm
' afraid even his ' Quantitative Analysis,' his

* grand discovery (for so it almost seems), of
' the magic residing in those words, * Numero,

* Pondere, et Mensv/rA* would be baffled to re-

* solve that problem.

* This field for instance ! they never thought

* to see it look like this : now, could they answer

* the question — What does it yet want ? —

* Yes ! the instantaneous reply would be lime.
* ' Why P* inquires Theory ; * Because it would

* sweeten it * — ^would be the answer. But why P

* Theory again asks. Practice is silent. What P

* silent, after sixty centuries of * JEa^perienceT

* Can nobody give us an answer — ^the truth, and

'calx' — ^AND EECALCITEATION. 41

* the whole truth of the operation of Lime upon
' soils ?* The Chemist attempts an explanation.

' Its effect arises from its avidity for combina-

* tion ; it searches out free acids, as a ferret
' does a rat, and instantly closes with them.

* Sulphuric, phosphoric, silicic, nitric, humic,
' and last, not least, the * Great Dissolver,* Cab-

* BONic acid : aU these it makes known, by seiz-
' ing upon them and becoming their base ; thus
' disintegrating as it were, and reconstructing

* the elements of the soil, and exciting to a new

* action the sluggards of Nature wherever they
' are lurking. — It is the Composer and the De-

* composer, for nature cannot suffer either pro-

* cess, but fertility must foUow : rc-composition

* (growth) has begun ere (decomposition is over :
' does a latent atom of organic matter stand
' inert for one instant? it is at him, like a

* Policeman, — * Come, kip moovin !*'

But is this aU?— is this halfP
Well may the * Incoming Tenant' ask **Mow
far is it to the Lime-kiln ? "

YII.

* EAETH 'STOP PING.

AnoNasT the yarious changes upon the aspect
of a Farm necessitated by modem practice, there
is none which causei a greater degree of con-
sternation in the inmiediate vicinity than the
removal of the Hedgerows. There is a kind of
time-honoured recognition and respect accorded
to these huge * mounds* four or five feet high,
and broad in proportion, with the running ac-
companiment of jungle sprawling at its pleasure
into the plough-land alongside, which it goes to
the very heart of the labourers themselves to
desecrate, or reduce to the regulation-standard.
It is all very well under the glowing candle-light,
with the map of your farm spread out before
you, and its hedgerows reduced to mere lines of
sepia or lamp-black, to cut and carve, at your
will, ten or twelve large square comely-looking
fields out of thirty or forty unaccountably-shaped
rhomboids imdreamt of in the hardest book of

* EABTH '-STOPPING. 43

£2uclid, and then to go and dream the realization
of your symmetrical example-farm, the wonder
and delight of ardent agriculturists : but what a
change comes over the spirit of the dream, when
you mizzle out o'doors in the foggy November
morning, and come to a dead stand-still at the
tangled side of a fence (Bless me ! why it looked
nothing on paper !) which has furnished the talk of
many a' Hunt-dinner for some centuries past, for
the splendid leaps and the splendid * purls,* it has
giyen rise — or given fall — ^to^Its height — ^its enor-
mous width — its insurmountable impracticable
look altogether, require an eye quite as steady
and a heart quite as firm as the hunter's, to take it.

It seemed like sacrilege, — ^indeed I felt self-
convicted, at the first daring onslaught upon
these giants of the olden time. I was obliged to
* take a rv/n at it ' mentally, as it were, as many
a man and horse had before done bodily and in
the flesh ; and stuff my ears against the covered
reproaches of the workmen.

"Famous bank for rabbits, this here, sir!
IVe know'd twenty couple killed in a day out
of it, in my time, when Squire "

"Ah! well — nevermind" — quoth I, sorely and
interruptingly : "but what's that — ^what have
you got there P"

44 CHE0NICLE8 OF A CLAY FAEM.

"This, BirP Lor* blesh ye! this is the earth
where that ould vixen lived as gave you such a
run last winter: IVe know'd a litter o* seven
whelps reared Jin this hole, an* heared *em a yelp-
ing an* howling o* the summer evenings as if the'
wondered when upon airth cub *unting 'ould
begin!"

This was the climax, usually. No martyr ever
suffered more than I nsed to carry home to
brealcfast into sub pectore, by way of travesty
to my over-night *s imaginative enjoyment at the
paper-prospect of large enclosures and unim-
peded plough-shares.

But the day of compensation came at last;
and with it came my first discovery of the ex-
traordinary sheep'siffhteobiess of spade-and-mat-
tock-wielding humanity. Not till the fence was
clear away, bank, thorns, pollards, ash-trees,
rabbit-holes, fox-earths, and all, did I ever hear
the exclamation —

" Well ! this is a wonderful alteration, to be
sure; why, I never thought to see it look in
this way ! It's quite a beautiful field now ! "

•One cheer for the map after all ! ' quoth I to
myself, as at next candle-light down I sat again
over the hi/rd's-eye view of acres which I now
began to find were trodden by bipeds and qua-

*EABTH*-ST0PP1NG. 46

drupeds with about equal perception of their plan
and bearLng. Who would be without an accu-
rate Map of his fann, who once knew the cumu-
lative triumphs that it brings of skill and head-
craft, as lavishly accorded in the end, as denied
in the outset, by the gregarious juries who sit
in judgment on his acts P

Down went fence after fence ! each with pre-
cisely the same prologue and epilogue of blame
and praise : for all the successful issues in the
world never stop or stay that rampant 'inconver-
tible' thing, criticism; that battery of inextin-
guishable pop-guns that is never silenced or
taken by assault. Down however went the
fences notwithstanding: and certainly, without
reference to any of the more subterraneous im-
provements of drainage, cultivation or otherwise,
the mere accession of business-like appearance
to the farm, when denuded of its miles of jungle,
was what Dame Quickly would caU " a thing to
thank God upon."

It would be a difficult but interesting task to
make out a calculation of the economy per acre,
of the riddance of these hideous and useless
strongholds of roots, weeds, birds, and vermin
that afflict the farms of merry England. Unpro-
ductive in themselves of anything that is good —

46 CHBONICLEB OF A CLAT FABH.

for even the timber they contain is very rarely
so— they are equally an obstruction to the plough
that toils for bread, and the eye that wanders
for beauty. Par be it from the old Chronicler to
depreciate the "tangled copse" or the "bound-
less contiguity of shade" that gilds the early re-
membrance of some, and the imagination of all;
that lives in the tasteful pages of Evelyn and
Price, or in the 'charming bits' of Wilson or
Nasmyth: but where can be the pictorial or
moral beauty of a great crooked artificial mound
surmounted by a dead fence serrated into gaps
and 'raspers,* or at the best, hogged into dreary
uniformity that cuts the blessed landscape from
the eye, by a man-made barrier of stakes and
* witherings.* " Take way the curtain that I may
see the picture" might any mortal say, who
from his first lesson in Geography had learnt
that a man six feet high has a sort of physical
right to a panoramic horizon of three nules on
this roimd globe of ours, even in a district like
mine where not a hill was to be viewed.

To be sure there is one rather formidable con-
sideration — ^the hedge-pheasant-shooting — * heat-
ing the outsides* — ^that pleasant October skir-
mishing that precedes the coming up of the
heavy artillery at Christmas ; but is it not rather

* eabth'-stoppino. 47

dearly retained, when land is being cut up for
IBailroads all round us, ^t two or three hundred
pounds the acre, and scarcely a vestige or margin
left to inclose for the "more more" cry of an
increasing population P

It is at the least a consolation to think that
tihese huge banks have no prescriptive right: that
when Cowper told us "God made the Country,"
lie did not mean to deny that man made the
hedgerows, or the conclusion that what he had
raised up, he might pull down ; especially when
it is discovered, as each may prove for himself,
that the Thorn grows much better on the level.

No! let the Park and the Fleasaunce have
their varied and picturesque alternation of bush
and tree and green-sward, of broken masses,
winding glades and labyrinthine glens ; and let
the Forest have its leafy screen, its deep and
devious mysteries of light and shade ; but let
the field of the husbandman have that beauty of
its own— the charm that Nature delights to
throw over everytlung in proper turn and place.
The waving and extensive Corn-field, the deep
rich winter verdure of the turnip-crop, the dark
and mellow surface of the fallow, owe little of
beauty to the net- work of intersecting barriers
that arrest at once the plough and the prospect.

48 CHBONICLES OF A CLAY FABM.

and carry a running nest of robbers, like earth-
works of the enemy, through the fair fields of
human skill and labour, and sacrifice at once the
food of man and the profit of the grower.

It is the eye of Prejudice, not of Taste, that
sees Beauty absent from Utility. Even in the
flattest districts, even upon *the Clay Farm'
itself, there is an undulating outline, a morsel of
the varied profile of our mother earth which
never revealed itself to the eye until those im-
pediments were abolished, which — ^like Ignorance
— ^make us mistake for a dull straight line that
which is only a part of The Great Cibcle.

VIII.

'TEUTH AT THE BOTTOM OP A'—
MAJiL-PIT.

Akonost the legacies which the wisdom and
labours of antiquity had bequeathed to the Clay
Farm and its cultivators, one of the most curious
and truly puzzling was a quantity of Marl-pits.
In erery field of five or six acres there was a
great yawning ' Pit,' deep enough to drown the
weathercock on a church steeple, and wide enough
to accommodate the church as well : and when
the broad hedgerows were stocked away (and,
in good truth, my two first winters made strange
havoo amongst those mounds of aggravating
width and crookedness), nothing can be ima-
gined more absurd than the efiect of these
deep wounds disclosed upon the bosom of mother
earth, lying thick and threefold in the fields
as now enlarged to an average of about twenty

B

60 CHEONICLES OF A CLAY FABM.

acres each. "Wliat on earth — or rather under the
earth — ^was to be done with themP Favoured
occupiers of the valleys and meadow-lands of
our Island, you hardly know what I mean ! lend
me your attention for a moment, while I read
a short chapter from that Geological Economy
which experience and the clays have taught me.
Amongst the manifold varieties which Nature
offers to the mind and gratitude of man, not the
least beneficent and beautiful is the Undulation
of the earth's surface. How little do we value
gifts and blessings that are quite familiar I Im-
agine for a moment a fiat earth with no variety
— no inclination of outline ; no hills, no dales,
no uplands or meadows, no running streams or
rivers, no tufted knoUs or winding dells, no
* gradients,* — ^but one vast unruffled surface, like
the sea in a dead calm, or the Great Desert
itself : and then imagine one thing more, a thing
which you are in the conventional habit of con-
sidering one of the greatest of agricultural bless-
ings — B,free percolating subsoil, underneath this
vast monotony of surface, sucking down every
drop of rain as it falls, and preserving not the
value of an eggshell of liquid for man or beast
to slake his thirst withal. What would you
have given, under such a state of things, for

*TBUTH AT THE BOTTOM OF A* — MABL-PIT. 61

TVo Hundred and Fifty acres of clay sfbsoil P
Would you not have regarded such a means of
retaining some of the moisture given by the
clouds, abnost as a special providence !* Too
much water — too much anything however good
— ^is always an inconvenience : but which were
best — ^too much or none at all? Now this is
precisely the thought that used to occur to me
(marked 'private') whenever some visitatorial
geological new-and-improved-agricultural stran-
ger bestowed an overdose of sublime pity upon
the affliction of clay that lay imdemeath my Flat
Farm,

*A pretty business you would have made of
it/ I used to think as I heard them glorifying
the merits of a free subsoil — * if you had had
the ordering of it !* Heaven be thanked, a
Wiser Hand than yours has had the manage-
ment of these things, and has, for the most part,

* " Levelled of Alps and Andes, without its Valleys

and Bavines,
How dull the face of earth, unfeatured of both beauty

and utility ! —
Praise Gbd, creature of earth, for the mercies linked

with secresy :
Praise God, his hosts on high, for the mysteries that

make all joy."

[* Proverbial Philosophy.*]

52 CHBOKICLES OF ▲ GLA.Y FARM.

confined the sandy subsoilB to tKe neighbour-
hood of rivers and running streams. Put yoop-
self OTf the top of a Salisbury coach, some fine,
hot, midsimmier's day, and take a trip across
the Marlborough downs, and then you will see
what it is to haye a thirsty chalk subsoil up(»
high land, "where no water is : " and then yoa
wiU see reason to conclude that there may be
some problems even more puzzling to deal with,
amidst the infinite rariety of earth's surface,
than a clay subsoil.

As late as the middle of the fifteenth century,
— ^we are told by an old writer* on husbandry
matters,— " lime, eyen close to the kiln, was
dearer than OaU;** an odd comparison, yet
forcible too;, and as roads were tiien not ex-
actly what they are now, it is easy to see that
our forefathers had reason good for making the
Marl-pit to do duty for the Lime-kiln-f Hie
inorganic matter that was jogged away from the

* Whitaker, Hist, of Craven, p. 324.

t It iR worth remark that Sir Anthony Fitzherbert,
Chief Justice of the Common Fleas, (whom by the bye
I hardly deserve to quote, seeing he calls himself ** an
eaeperyenced farmer of more than 40 yearea '*) in his
Bo^e, of Husbandrid,' published ia 1523, frequently
mentions the employment of Marl, but in hi)^ hat of
Manures, etc., omits Lime altogether.

*TEUTH AT THE BOTTOM OF A* — MABL-FIT. 63

Farm with every bushel of wheat or potuid of
butter or cheese that went to market, did not
c3ome back again from the clouds. They soon
fonnd ont that. Human instinct and experience
had discovered the gradual loss of somethmg,
which neither rain nor sunshine nor even the
farm-made-manure, deprived of these elements,
could restore, — ^long before Davy and liebig
were bom, or Sulphates and Phosphates had
been christened : and hence the Marl-pits.

Curious and awkward relics of a bygone day
they were, dotted about over my farm, and look-
ing more numerous and unmeaning than ever,
after the enlargement of the fields, and the
straightening of the few fences that were left.
Load after load of clay from the drains, and
some himdred butts of felled trees, and useless
pollards from the vanished hedgerows were cast
headlong into their voracious depths: but enough
yet remained, and will long remain, to tell of
the enormous labour that must once have been
expended in excavating a manure more costly
in its application than the Guano which from
the far islands of the Pacific Ocean, conveyed by
sea and land, thousand upon thousand of nules,
finds its destination at last upon the field of
British husbandry.

54 . CHSONICLES OF A CLAY 7ABH.

Well might the farmer of the olden time bore
like a Well-sinker, at whatever amoimt of labour,
for aught in the shape of a restorative, when
"the difficulty of commimication arising £ronl
the nearly total want of roads precluded the
interchange of commodities ; when goods were
carried on pack-horses, a mode of conveyance
which necessarily prevented the conveyance of
bulky articles to any considerable distance. The
price of grain was thus materially affected, for
while some districts were suffering from scarcity,
others were overflowing with a surplus, and it
was enhanced beyond its real value in one place,
while it sunk below it in another : just as at the
present day, in many parts of Poland that are
distant from great towns, and without water
communication, the value of the crops is so di-
minished by the expense or impracticability of
carriage on ill-constructed roads, that cultivation
is generally neglected,***

In a word, cheap labour and dear carriage
were the tools that dug those ancient marl-pits ;
and many a long and lonely reverie upon the
changes that centuries have brought about, did
they afford me, — after the last workman had
whistled his willing way homewards, and I stood

* Introduction to British Agriculture. U.K.S.

*TEX7TH AT THE BOTTOM OF A* — ^HA£L-FIT. 65

upon their brink with the silenced field around
me, and the evening sky drawing its noiseless
curtain overhead; till some peeping twinkling
spangle reflected in the water at my feet, warned
me that the bright little sentinels of Heaven
were taking one by one their watch-posts, and
beckoning me to foUow the example which one
weary toiler after another had set,* even to the
very Plough that lay sleeping in its bed in the
half-finished furrow at my side, as if nothing
would ever move it again. And then through
the still night air, as I moved tardily homewards,
there would come a sound — a strange sound
which the diggers of those ancient marl-pits
never heard by day or night. Was it a beetle
or some other lazy insect, homeward bound, that
made that peculiar humm which seemed to thrill
through the atmosphere, far away at first — then
gradually nearer, and then louder and more tre-
mulous as a gust of wind brushed by — ^then

fainter — and fainter still — and then ^gonel

What was it? if the ear could measure miles,
it might seem to have traversed some seven or
eight, before it reached me. Oh ! ye who tilled
these fields and dug these marl-pits in the days

* " et jam nox hmnida ccelo
Preecipitat, suadentque cadentia sidera somnos."

66 . CHBONICLSS OF A CLIY 7ABH.

<xf narrow lanes and pack-saddles, what would
you have said to that Mail-Train that was flying
Izke a meteor throng i^e night, upon its track
of polished iron, some seven or eight miles
away; annihilating Distakcs, yet leaving Spacb
undiminished ; turning the wide-spread country
abodes of men into one vast Metropolis of hu-
man Society, Mutuality, and Intelligence, not
choked and deadened by long rows of brick-aad-
mortar, like the dull changdess man-manufac-
tured Town, but open and free and indep^ident
as ever, with earth and air and sky unpolluted,
undesecrated by the Throng; yet Man united
by the closest intercourse and sympathy with the
marts of aggregated skill and progress in each
Art and Science that instructs, enriches, or en-
nobles.

Despise not the Town, O man of gaiters, cor-
duroys, and diort-cut-away, whose face is stereo-
typed into perpetual jollity by iN'ature's whole-
scone m^ry hand, whose talk is of Swedes,
Superphosphate, and Eed Lammas ; nor do thou
despise the country, O ^ck-coated, sleek-hatted
umbrella'd Town-denizen, whose face is blanched
and thoughtM, and mayhap a little wrinkled,
and whose talk is of Price-current, Scrip, Car-
goes, and Consols. For you are each other's

*TBUTH AT THE BOTTOM OF A* — MABL-FIT. 67

Customers and Brothers: the iron artery of
locomotive traffic, and the electric nerve of fly-
ing Thought, have brought you into a new and
closer bond of reciprocity and fellowship: it
matters little at which end of the wire your
place and life-task are appointed ; your hearts
and heads were cast in the same human mould,
and it is hard but such a tie as now unites their
throbs and thoughts, shall strike out some results
and combinations tibat you scarcely dream of
yet» from the twin realities of Agriculture and
Commerce.

IX.

'FALLOWS'— AND WHAT FOLLOWS.

When the land is drained, and the crooted
ridges obliterated; the iiseless fences stocked
away, and the few that remain straightened ; the
Ash- trees and old poUards grubbed up, the awk-
ward inequalities of surface reduced, by the
spade as well as the plough; the Farm-build-
ings improved, and adapted for the better and
roomier accommodation of a better and larger
head of stock: and last not least, the House
rendered habitable for human beings "both male
and female" — ^when aU. this is done — and thanks
to increasing Population, increasing Trade, and
increasing Intelligence, such things are done,
here and there, now-a-days; — it will in most
cases be found that a considerable amoimt of
Time, and oi-^something else will have been ex-
pended. But can it in truth be said that imtil
this be done, the Plough can ever start, with a

'fallows' — AJXJy WHAT TOLLOWS. 59

fair chance P Does any one seriously believe
that the employment of his farm-labourers for a
few winters, in the execution (as much as possible
by fairly-paid task-work) of these preliminaries,
is a matter of supererogation or an improfitable
outlay? Suppose it cost £10 to the acre, and
including all, we must prepare for such on aver-
age,, is it so extravagantly disproportionate to
the looked-for return in the shape of Interest
for Capital as to exceed the ordinary ventures of
men in other branches of industry? Is the
abolition of the bare summer Fallow, of the
half cultivated and therefore half productive
Headlands, of the eternal labour of hedging
and ditching, the depredations of birds and ver-
min, the everlasting turning of the plough and
other implements of culture, with time-losing,
harness-breaking, and horse-laming, to corres-
pond; the injurious shade and droppings of
trees, the stagnating water, and the barren fur*
rows, — ^is the immunity, I say, from all these
and many other eviis recurring not once, but
every mortal year, and year after year, to the
end of time, — to be foregone, because of the
dreaded outlay (and is it a loss of the interest F)
of £10 per statute acre ?

The question seems simple enough : yet after

<K) CHB0KICI.E8 OF ▲ CLAY FASM.

«11 IB done, whether by Landlord at Tenant, or
by both in one, there is yet one more question
-to be asked before the answer can be prudently
Tentoied. I do not mean Ihe question whether
ihere is a l<mg Lease : that indeed must speak for
itself: it is a qaestioli if possible more important
4hflsi eren that. It is a practical question ; let
ttti give it a practical elucidation.

It is one of the most expressive and meaning
features, rather than a deformity, of agriculture,
ihat it is AiU of exceptions and variations, and of
what men call Disceppointmewts. However good
in their way broad principles, and laid-down
eourses of cropping or of treatment may be,
experience soon teaches us that not only each
feicil, but to a certain extent each field, has its own
indep^ident character and claim upon the judg-
ment, which will not be wisely submitted to
the Frocmstean law of this or that succession of
erops. Skilful management is at least required
to coax a farm into the designed and fore-deter-
mined' Sotation of fotir-course or six-course, or
any other course of husbandry; and to this end
it is generally useM, and sometimes amusing, to
inquire into the local reputatiou which ahnost
every field will be found, on inquiry, to have
established. But when two or three or four

* FALLOWS '-r-.AHD WHAT FOLLOWS. 61

fields come to be tkrowu into one, in a distnot
onginaily closa-fenoed, and whfire great rarietias
of soil are mat wil^ this deferenioe to tke ttr*
chBology of the land becomes rather ptuizti&g
to indulge and carry out.

Being bent upon the adoption, as far as posti^
ble, of the six-course shift, I had made it obob of
the occupations of those yaluahle provisions, of
nature, — ^the long Winter Evenings,-— to cut,
carve, and contrive, upon the map of my isxau
a division of the arable land into six pnncipal
fi.eld& The task was not a very easy one. The
indimdiion of the land, being very slight, luid to
be studied with the greater care. ; the fences that
should remain were not always the best or the
straightest ; and that halfway house of indeciflion
(so well known to aJl busy travellers on thA
highway of hfe), between making agood job at
once, on the one side, and economy of labour, on
the other, occasioned many a halting hour o£
doubt, during which Day and I^ight, Map and
Land, alternately gave each other the lie, and
took it back again» with that quick reciprocii^^
and alternation, for which halfway houses, reai
as well as metaphorical, are not uncelebrated m
fact and fiction. We are told by the oldest oi
profane historians* that it W9» the practice of tho

62 CHBONICLES OF A CLAY FABM.

ancient Persians to think over every important
plan twice : first, in the morning when tkey
were sober, and again in the evening when they
were — mahmg speeches ; and vice versd : and as
decision and steady purpose, in the field, when
the work is once begun, is as useM, and almost
as necessary, to the Farmer, as to the Field-
marshal; and as that exacting and important
branch of the community — ^your neighbours —
don't usually approve of your doings imtil they
understand them — or in other words, laugh at
you, till you begin (or might begin) to laugh
at them; it is eminently advisable, at least I
found it so, to gall a pretty frequent meeting
of that privy-council which every man is Chair-
man of, who has got Daylight and Eyes, Candle-
light and Brains, a Farm and a good Map of
it. And if, O ardent and yet perhaps sensitive
Beginner, you will take one word of advice from
an *old file* — ^if once you have come to a deter-
mined vote and conclusion, after full deliberation
with these fellow-councillors, and after hearing
all they have got to urge pro and cow.,— don't let
anything or anybody divert or modify your plan.
Your experience and mine will differ very mucb
if you do not find more expense, and more re-
gret, left behind invariably by an «7M^r-done

'yALlOWS* — A.VID WHAT FOLLOWS. 63

than by an over-done job. '* The first expense
is the least" in agriculture — ^and in everything
else perhaps, with the old exceptions of Law and
Matrimony.

The first field which I had drained, and to
whose chronicled history I must now return,
was a tolerably rectangular result of what had
formerly been two fields, and part of a third ;
and consisted, after its enlargement, of about
twenty-two acres. One half of this, that is to
say, one of the fields as previously fenced, I de-
voted to a crop of Swedes — ^the first that ever
had been heard of on the farm (and the last, in
the opinion of all surrounding Wisdom, that
ever would be) ; the other part, for reasons in
which I suspect you would have acquiesced, had
you seen it, I determined to indulge with its old
but long-forgotten friend, a bare summer fallow,
and with a dose of that same Lime, about whose
chemical effects and influences we had so long a
soliloquy some time back. Until the end of
April all went on alike over the whole of the
twenty-two acres. Ploughing, scuffling, and
leveUmg were the order of the day, to the great
seandal of the high ridges and their admirers ;
but on the ponderous and august entry of the
clod-cmsher (a new monster in those days), the

64 CHBONICUBS OF A CLAT FARM.

filst-mentioned half of the field took leftT» of the
other, and as each clod yielded up its individu-
ality under the potent arguments of that most
persuasive of implements, the modem fallow
went a-head of the ancient, and old Jethro Tull
himself would have envied me the delight of
seeing the work of comminution and perfect in-
termixture which its magic transit left; behind it.
J^erer was there such a sagacious or relentless
old tyrant in dealing with a dod, aa this same
Crogghill, for so it shaU be named, and right
deservedly. If he can't crush it with his Re-
pliant foot, he takes it up aecwndwn artem as a
mastiff would a bone, and gives it a squeeze with
his iron teeth ; and if that won't do, why then
like a buU he tosses it over, and gores it with
the next revolution. Clever must be the lump
that, after one or two such embraces, escapes
with its integrity less broken than to the ex-
emplar of a handM of Walnuts.

Then came a nameless implement of private
use and manufacture — a mysterious compound
breed, with a grubber for its. sire, and an iron
hay-rake for its dam, to lift .and re-expose the
crushed and stifled soil ; and then the lar^e and
heavy roUer to crack the walnuts ; and then-^

(Even in the most fertile districts the Grass

'fallows' — AUD WHAT FOLLOWS. 66

crop had been short the preyious summer ; the
quantity of manure was therefore small, and
the quality, on a farm that had never borne a
Turnip — !)

" Shall we begin the ridging up for the Swedes
to-morrow P " quoth the baihff.

" Yes, one half of it ; the other half wiU be
manured with guano."

"WithwAa^, Sir!"

I will spare you the little scene of utter mys-
tification which followed this announcement ; the
subject would be antiquated now; though many
an amusing tale might doubtless be told of the
fijrst introduction of that "magic compound"
upon the rural mind. In spite of smiles, winks,
murmurings, shakes of the foreboding head, and
other demonstrations, jocular and serious, the
guano was at last duly sowrty on the flat, a ton
to five acres, and ridged in ; the other five re-
ceiving a hundred cartloads of *the good old
stuff i* hauled (half a mile) from the farm-yard,
forked into the ridges, and covered in by a
second ridging, as usual.

* A hundred to one upon the farm-yard ma-
nure* ! of course, — or any other amount of odds :
all bidders, and only one moonstruck, misguided
taker. It proved a miserable year for Turnips

06 CHRONICLES OF A CLAY FABH.

generally. Everywiiere ' The Fly' was omnipo-
tent and omnivorant : the odds fell a little when
the highly backed * farm-yard' ridges had to be
sown a second time, but a crop came at last, —
about the ske of apples.
And what on the guano P
From twenty to twenty-four tons, by weight,
per acre. "Not *the best' but *the only* crop to
be seen in the neighbourhood.

If people sometimes get less credit than their
due in this world, they must not forget to balance
the account with that which they get without
deserving. The Penguin of the vast Pacific was
the Wizard that had made this crop, not I : yet
had good Sir Matthew Hale been living, not all
the waters of the Pacific would have saved me
from roasting alive.

So much for ten acres out of the twenty-two,
and the modem fallow: now for ancient practice,
and the other twelve.

THEOEY AND PEACTICE.

The compaarative failure of that portion of my
first Turnip crop, wMch had drawn so heavily
and so laboriously upon the meagre resources
of the farm-yard, produced a changed position
of the game, which gave me some surprise. I
found myself at length my own severest critic.
Whether from the continuing force of that early
prepossession in favour of the * good old stuff,'
which had laid the bets — as heavily as the ma-
nure—upon that part of the field, or whether the
fiact of the mere germination of a tumip-seed
where it had never shown its delicate First-leaf
before, was triumph enough, it is hard to say;
but somehow or other it was the fashion to semi-
dignify with the title of a 'fair little crop* even
tliose five acres which so wretchedly disappointed
my own expectations. As for the crop where
the guano was sown, it went off from the first

68 CHBONICLES OF A CLAY FASM.

sub silentio : it was stared at, and stared at still,
as a sort of conjurer's trick which * you couldnt
do again.* Wise men shook their heads and
held their tongues at it. Nobody would have
been at all surprised if, on going to the field
some fine morning, he had found it altogether
vanished, like a faery-gift, as quickly as it came :
and as the roots swelled and swelled into con-
firmed substance and reality through September
and October, the silence about it became per-
fectly portentous. Reluctantly the hoers con-
fessed that they had not thinned it half enough;
and indeed the loss, from that very common
cause, was considerable. But where did the crop
come from P how did it grow P by what means,
short of the supernatural, could a mere powder,
however highly scented, sown by the hand, pro-
duce this great fat thriving mass of roots and
leaves P Surely it must at any rate be but a
fraud upon the land after all ; and the next crop
would show the difierent results of real manure
and a mere stimulant. This was the point to
which OPINION at last settled down. * We'll
wait and see,' was the final determination ex-
pressed: and over many and many a farm in
England and Scotland men did wait, and did see.
Of all the practical illustrations that ever ap-

THEOEY AND FBACTICE. 69

peared contemporaneously with the announce-
ment of a great doctrine, the introduction and
use of Guano during the lifetime of liebig is
one of the happiest and most remarkable. If
some great physical event had testified to men's
bodily senses the motion of the Earth round the
Sun, and the steady centricity of that luminary,
during the exact lifetime of Copernicus or Ga-
lileo ; or if some conceivable reflection of the
earth's surface in the deep azure of heaven, had
exhibited to men's wondering eyes the outline of
the great American continent looming along its
obverse hemisphere, just as Columbus had de-
parted in quest of it, — they would not each
have ftimished a more triumphant vindication of
the achievements of those master-minds, during
their own existence, than that which the more
fortunate Professor of Giessen has been destined
to witness. No sooner had the persecuting in-
fidelity of man (the same in every age) begun
to crucify his great theory of the nutejtion
OF PLANTS FBOM THE Atmosfhebe, than the
use of Guano and of inorganic manures began
to give it proof. * Bum a plant, whether it be
an Oak-tree or a stalk of Clover' (for so the
assertion of the great Analyst may be briefly
epitomized), ' and the trifling ash it leaves will

70 CHH0NICLE8 OF A CLAY FABM.

show you all it ever got from the soil.* But the
bulk, the weight, the great mass of its vegetable
structure — ^where is that gone P

"Into the Air:
And what seemed corporeal hath melted
Like breath into the wind !"

The weight, the bulk, the vegetable mass, of a
crop, is simply, its Carbon. Combustion just
undoes what geowth did: and nothing more.
It recombines the Carbon of the plant with the
Oxygen of the air, and their union is Carbordc-
acid gas, the very substance which the leaves of
a plant feed upon in the air where it is presented
to them in its gaseous form in which alone they
can absorb it : they do absorb it ; and in their
clever little laboratory they pick out the carbon,
and return the oxygen ; just as our own lungs
take up the oxygen and return the nitrogen.
Multiply the two sides of an oak-leaf by the
number of leaves on the tree, and you will be
able to form some idea of the extent of surface,
which the plant annually presents to the atmo-
sphere to carry on this work of absorption.
But the Roots — what is their use then P
Examine them through a Microscope, and you
will see that, as the Leaves are adapted to inter-

THBOET AND PBACTICE. 71

oouTse with Aib, so the Eoots are adapted to
Watbe : not stagnant water : for tTie sponge rots
which is always saturated, and their myriad fibres
are each Aimished at the end with a sponge
capable of rapid expansion and contraction, —
suited therefore to a medium in which moisture
should be ever on the move, downwards by
gravitation, or upwards by capillary attraction.
This is the true condition' of the soil demanded
of the mechanical department of husbandry.
•Pulverize your soil deeply,' said Jethro Tull,
who thought that plants lived upon fine particles
of moidd : and he said rightly, but in so far as
he said only half, and thought that was all, he
thought wrongly.

But not more wrongly than every Farmer
thinks who fancies that the hulk of his manure
is its valuable part. He rather hugs his enemy
in this, as he has done in other matters. The
hulk and weight of Farm-yard manure is simply
the carbon which it ohtained la^t year from the
Atmosphere ; ail of which must go through a
long process of decay before it will have set free
the Mineral and Ammoniacal parts, which to-
gether constitute, when dissolved by water, the
suction-food of roots.

Liebig asserts, that if the roots are duly sup-

72 CHRONICLES OF A CLAY FARM.

plied with these mineral and ammoniacal sob-
stances, the rapid development of the leaves will
soon obtain sufficient carbon from the air. The
labours of the Dung-cart, as at present carried
on, even in the most improved districts awkward
and uneconomical, exhibit under more backward
management, a system of elaborate extravagance
and loss, which the least chemical acquaintance
with what toe are ahaut, would render utterly
intolerable. By frequent turnings in the yard,
and long exposure in the field, every opportunity
for the escape of the Ammonia and every toil in
the lifting, hauling, forking, and ploughing-in of
the Carbon is lavishly expended. And all " free
gratis for nothing," if plants imbibe Httle carbon
at that end. What portion the roots do take
up, has to be oxygenated in the leaf and decom-
posed again before plants will re-assimilate it :
a subsidiary faculty which bountiful Nature has
given them, with different degrees of necessity
for making use of it.

But it is otherwise in autumn and winter
manuring. "Decay is only slow combustion: and
when you are burying great cart-loads of car-
bonaceous manure in the soil before winter, you
are making a hotbed under-ground, which will
raise the temperature of the soil throughout the

THEOBT AND PBACTICE. 73

long reign of Jack Frost, and preserve many a
tender seed that would otherwise perish: and
herein Hes the chief and wise application of all
carbonaceous or bulky manure. Hightly, then,
so far as their knowledge went, did our fore-
fathers, who knew nothing of Turnip culture,
plough-in their long manure before winter : a
poor practice at best, we say, to put manure in
immediate contact with a grain crop: but not
more poor than to apply to a green spring-crop
under the burning sun of June the treasures of
the Farm-yard whose spirit is exhaled before
tbe body is buried, and whose body is not rotted
time enough to afford its remnant of inorganic
food to the crop it is applied to.

"Who can wonder, then, that the 'artificials*
should sometimes beat the long manure, for
Spring application P And who can doubt that
we wise modems have left half our lesson un-
learnt, in having changed the time of manuring
without changing also the condition of the ma-
nure?

An experiment, whose object was to test the
comparative merits of the Ancient and the Mo-
dem Fallow, seemed to some people almost un-
meaning. The superiority of a green crop over
no crop at all, providing that the land is dry

74 CHBOKICLSS OT A CLAY FABM.

enough in the winter for eating or carting it off
when grown, was one of those public proposi-
tions that people had run away with in a hurry,
and got their fingers burnt and had to * drop it'
like a hot Potato, before they had had tLaie to
stop and look it in the face.

Fortunately I was a beginner in the fall sense
of the word. Fashionable opinion was no more
a * child of mine* than antiquated Prejudice. I
had the same profound respect for each, and
both; that sort of profound respect which maikes
you take your hat off very low and keep a cer-
tain distance off. Not that I was in love with
my own opinion, for I had none to be in lore
with. My agricultural intellect realized Locke's
theory of the rasa tabula. Bare fallowa had
reached a respectable old age, if not a green
one, in the world's history ; I had no personal
quarrel of my own against them ; the half of
the field set apart for the tnal was hideously
foul, and stiffer land than the part imder tur-
nips ; manure was deficient, and spring-time
busy ; everything seemed to favour and suggest
the comparison, so I made it. A dull, lumber-
ing piece of work it is, too, to spend the "long,
long summer hours" in lazily turning the "greate
elottes" as old Fitzherbert calls them, in that

THBOBT AND PBACTICB. 76

quaint passage where he cantions his brother
fanners not to he in too great a hwrry to break
them : a piece of advice which every farmer has
told as a new discovery of his own touching
bare fallows, from the time, three centuries ago,
when Sir Anthony Fitzherbert wrote ; and for
three centuries before, perhaps.

But it is trying work, no doubt, to see the
fields around you teeming with richest vegetation
— ^nature all alive in every direction with the
bursting wealth of present produce and maturity,
— and to toil on nevertheless upon the bare and
burning fallow, where the very dews of Heaven
refuse their evening tear, and the morning ray
darts in wide vain search after the liquid Bril-
liant that it finds on every grass-blade, every
leaf, and every flower throughout the rest of
Creation. One has heard of ' knocking a man
into next week ;* such a misfortune might chance
to befal one inadvertently, and on suitable pro-
vocation : but to be ploughing next year for nine
months of this one, and three of the last, to see
everything around overtaking you as it were by a
twelve-month, — ^leaves growing more juicy and
green, and crops getting richer and riper, and
you and your fallow, like a sort of converse
Oasis, — ^Desert amidst the Green, — still dragging

76 CHBONICLBS OF A CLAY PABM.

beliind, "feeding the air, promise-cramm'd," a
Leart-sick waiter upon tlie deferred liope of iiext
year, — It w trying work, no doubt !

But life is fiiU of it : and especially of snch
as this. Wliat is Education but a twenty-years*
fallow, beart-wearying and self-denying of the
pleasures that seem to bloom invitingly around
us, luring the warm spirits and fresh feelings of
youth, to the easy indulgence of more active
enjoyment and contact with the world. What
is manhood but a continued sphere of the same
self-denial, another chapter in the biography of
Toil — for a future crop — amidst the wistful
temptation of surrounding fruition. What is
Life itself but a fallow — ^and hare enough to
many a weary and assiduous toiler — a fallow for
the future garnering of the joyfdl crop that was
sown in tears.

And many such a truthM and intended ana-
logy does the Farmer read, albiet no metaphysi-
cal scholar, in the Book of Nature's Symbols.
They reach the eye of the mind through that of
outward vision, without the need of types and
words. " It is not Speech nor Language, yet
their voices are heard." And shame upon the
parent and the country that allows her sons
to be banished, at the tender age of childhood.

THEOBY AND FBACTICE. 77

from the school of early instraction to the la-
bours of the field, before the mind has received
that gentle care and training which enlivens,
explains, and even dignifies the lowest toil, if
toil can ever be low, as only Ignorance ima-
gines. The old Chronicler, amidst his own
early blunders and extravagance, has yet had no
occasion to correct the first impression with
which he looked upon a child turned into a scare-
crow for the new-sown field, a boy 'driving
plough' the livelong day, and a man (a mind !)
threshing in a barn ! without one hour for the in-
struction and development of that higher part
which separates his mind from the Brutes, his
body from Machinery !

Talk of * Agricultural Improvements' — of the
difficulty of getting the labourers to take to a
new implement, or adopt an improved method !
What enables you to see its advantage and
adopt it P Your Mind. What cultivates your
farm better than your neighbour's P Your Mind.
If that alone be left imcultivated around you,
— at every point, at every turn, in every field,
in every furrow, in every hedge, in every ditch,
in your House, in your Dairy, in your Stable,
in your Bam, everywhere and at every time,
by Day and Night, Winter, Spring, Summer,

78 CHBONICLES OF A CLAY FAEM.

and Autumn — ^the neglect that haa been allowed
to sow itself, the moral weed-crop, wiU meet your
eye to baffle and torment you with the feeling
so truiihfully expressed, when you say that you
* have not a single mind you can depend upon !'

No wonder : you have never tried to nuaJce one.

Else, you would not have ypur Lime over-
slaked ; aa I had, during an unavoidable tempo-
rary absence, while my twelve acres of bare fal-
low were in progress. Lime was all I meant to
give them ; except a thorough ctdfivation. Every
ridge was levelled : not an elevation or a hollow
remained: the subsoil that had been exposed
through the winter was thoroughly intermixed :
the plough and the subsoil-plough had eqtially
done their work ; and twelve quarters of lime
to the acre was all I added^ before the seed was
sown.

My great object was to see the specific opera-
tion of lime upon a worn-out soil. If written
words may be relied on, it is the most puzzling
substance the farmer has to do with. The
chemist teUs us, and with truth, no doubt, that
it has two distinct effects ; one upon vegetable
matter which it helps to decompose ; the other
upon mineral matter which it 'corrects.* Sueh
is the word, and we must use it for want of a

THBOBY AND FBACTXCS. 79

better. In the first operation it is virtually a
* manure,' because it turns into food for the crop,
organic matter wbich would else have remained
inert : in the second it is an inorganic alterative,
supplying calcareous matter, and forming a base
for the &ee acids exposed in the freshly moved
subsoil.

I had taken some pains to ascertain the pre-
vious character of the field. Fifteen or sixteen
bushels of wheat to the acre (undrained, and in
high ridge and furrow) was the utmost crop the
memory of man could furnish an account of.

The crop of wheat came up weU, looked even
and healthy, but not thick, throughout the suc-
C5eeding summer, and ripened late. The pro-
duce, when threshed out, was six-and-thirty
bushels, including rather more than half a
bushel of * Tail,* to the acre.

How completely the Lime had done its work,
in both capacities, may be judged of from the
fact that on a couple of acres which I retained
expressly for the after experiment, and sowed
with Beans «id then with Gaits, unmanured* the
two Bucceeding years, the return exhibited an
utter exhaustion of the productive powers of the
soil, to an extent that I could hardly have be-
lieved, without experimental proof

80 CHSONICLSS OF A CLAY FABM.

Thougli it cannot be desirable to see the prac-
tice of bare fallows extended ; for it exists al-
ready upon many soils where it might be with
every advantage substituted by green crops ; it
must yet be borne in mind that it is not in the
mechanical structure alone that heavy soils differ
from light soils ; their chemical difference, which
is qxdte as great, lies in that essential particular
that the clay soil is naturally richer ia the
mineral constituents reqmred by your crops.
Potash, Soda, and Phosphorus, which you must
supply to a light soil before you sow it, you
have only to develope in a clay soil by deep and
frequent stirring, and submitting to the oxida-
tion of the atmosphere. The green-crop, with its
carbon-obtaining leaves, wiU no doubt supply
organic wealth to either ; but inorganic food can
come from the soil alone ; and if the soil be able
to supply it from its own resources, one-half the
value of the green-crop, as a fertilizer, is re-
nounced. Its remaining value, as a collector of
organic matter from the atmosphere, is the point
upon which the question will be poised, of its
adoption on a soil which, after effectual drainage,
sub-pulverization, and liming, still retains the
character of a *clay.' Even upon such land,
(which is not so plentiful as some imagine,) expe-

THEOBY AND PEACTICE. 81

rience has yet to prove how far, by deep plough-
ing and sub-soiling immediately after harvest,
and making the most of suitable weather be-
tween that time and the following summer, the
useM Swede or Turnip may take its place in a
six-course system as profitably as iu the four-
course system upon lighter soils. The bare fal-
low is too ancient, too prospectively laborious,
and patient f not to have deep reason at the bot-
tom of it. Chemistry has only explaiaed the
truth which Practice had established. The ques-
tion may be, not whether the fallow shall be
abandoned, but whether its objects can be
achieved at a less sacrifice of Time.

XI.

DISSOLVING VIEWS.

In these busy days of Land-navigation, when
a man can hardly travel twenty miles along the
old-fashioned high road leading from anywhere
to anywhere else, without rumbling under the
skew arch, or half dislocating his mortal frame-
work over the temporary bridge, of a 'Eailway
in progress,' as Mr. Bradshaw, with monthly
mockery and pertinacity of promise, calls it,
most people may have had opportunities of no-
ticing certain funnel-shaped pyramids of earth
left standing in the 'cuttings,* which, if not
exactly like their prototypes, —

" Flinging their shadows jBrom on high,
Fop time to count his ages by,"

yet answer very satisfactorily the more modem
object of showing what deep wrinkles the face
of mother earth may receive in short chro-

DISSOLVING VIEWS. 83

nologies, and what geological liberties people
take with her in her old age to what they used
to do ; inverting her established strata, shovel-
ling Lias, ChaJk, and B«d-sandstone over each
other in most admired disorder, leaving only
these frail memorials standing as if by way of a
small sample of 'England before the Conquest'
of spade and wheelbarrow.

When looking over the changed aspect of a
twenty acre field, with its drained, deepened,
levelled, manured, tumipped, barleyed, soil,
smoothly smiling under the sunshine in its first
year's Clover, how often I have wished that
some such relic of its original state could have
survived, to present to the unimaginative eye that
now sees it for the first time, the long story —

"Eheu! quantus equis, quantus erat viris
Sudor!"

and furnish a reply of befitting smartness to the
cold-blooded cruelty of look and phrase that
extinguishes all your pride-full thoughts by
some such damning praise as this : — "Well ! a
very nice field; a very beautiful field, indeed!
very nice, but a — I don't see anything par-
ticular, not ver^ particular, in it. I'm no
farmer, you know; you'U excuse me," &c. —

84 CHBONICLBS OF A CLAY FARM.

" ^aecuse you ! Why, what upon earth did yon
come out to see P " I long to ask of each gaping
sight-seeker, who seems to have expected a series
of dissolving views, or some dioramic transpa^
rency exhibiting Drains running, Sub-soil crum-
bling. Ammonia fixing. Turnips growing. Sheep
fattening, Wheat reaping, and all the phenomena
that 'trammel up the consequence * of agricul-
tural emprise, much after the fashion of the
nursery tale that finds such rapid denouement
when "the cat began to eat the mouse !"

Beautiful in every best sense of the word as
an improved and weU-cultivated farm may he,
how bashfully does it reveal to any but the
deserving eye, the eye that has rightfully and
laboriously earned its perceptive power, the
developed capability obtained by the soil firom
the judicious appliances of art. The Painter
may draw a Landscape, the Florist may fur-
nish a Hothouse, the Landscape-gardener may
produce an *eflfect* with compendious skill; but
there are two things in nature bearing truth-
ful analogy with each other, firom the world of
matter to that of mind, which defy the hand
of imitation; both are comprehended by the
one same word, cultivation. It carries no
label, no title-page or illustration to the idle

DISSOLVING VIEWS. 85

speculatioii of the eye; it is no talker; it
asks "an understanding, but no tongue : " full
as Nature is of ornament at every stage, she dis-
dains to make an exhibition of her intrinsic pro-
ffress at any. The railroad workman leaves a
pyramid to mark the ancient outline of the sur-
face ; and it is wise in him, for he has a motive
in the retrospective measurement. But with
nature it is not so : oiswasd is the eternal word ;
and the memory how this meadow looked when
it was that morass, or this fair field when it was
that jungle of high hedges, stunted ash-trees,
tangled bushes, with docks and thistles to cor-
respozui, — ^to say nothing of heaved-up ridges
and crooked ftirrows, — all is past ; and he who
looks on it as it is, might as weU ask leafy Sum-
mer to show him how Winter looks on the same
spot, as expect the improved field to show him
the history of its improvement. "Oh! Sir, if
you had but seen this field as J remember it! "
has been the half-mortified exclamation or re-
monstrance of many a worthy toiler upon earth's
surface, whose handywork has left no landmarks
except upon his own brow. "If you had but
seen it as it was; " — and there the interjectional
sentence ends imfinished : would it be far from

86 CHBONICLES OF A CLAY FAEM.

the truth — ^a truth that will be one day better
understood — ^to continue it thus : —

— You would give honour to the toiler and
the toil that are employed in carrying out the
beneficent designs of Providence for man, in sub-
duing, fertilizing, and beautifying the spot of
earth on which his lot is cast. You would ask
why for thousands of years we have crowned
the Warrior with Laurels, the Poet with Ivy, the
Citizen with mural crowns, and the Husband-
man with — nothing. You would ask why his
achievements are without record and his name
without honour ; and his only reward that which
is to be found in the words of the bitter satirist :
— ''LaudaiAir, et alget ! "

xn.

A WOED AT PAETING.

Mtjeky days of November ye have come — and
gone again, — over one at least who has found
out and tasted of your Poetry : and in turning
over the leaves of a crowded diary of years and
days gone by, his hand can scarce touch without
the gentle pressure of old fellowship the page
after page that recounts the active business
which lighted up even your dark atmosphere
and drizzling skies; till the spent and scanty
day again and again drove him, reluctant, to
the *bell, book, and candle,' from which the mind
would wander back a-field, over every yard of
nicely levelled drain ; and hear, in fancy, the
d/rip drip drijp going on through the silent night,
while weary labourers sleep, and Nature, the
unwearied labourer, still woeks alone.

What a thought — ^to the mind that knows its

88 CHSONICLES OF A CLAY FASM.

history and value — ay I ke may be bold enough
to say who has known and felt it, — ^what a
blessed thought is a well-drained Field! A
portion, a small yet measurable portion of Na-
ture's reality, brought by the hand of man firom
sterility to fruitfiilness — ^from its first and in-
complete existence to its intended and developed
state. What a thought to cheer and lighten
the dull November fog, — ^that hundreds and
thousands of acres in this moist England of ours
which once began their annual saturation witli
the Autumn rains, and lay in barreu quagmire
the livelong Wiater through, unwakenable from
tbje clammy trance of their yearly death even by
the eheerfol voice and breath of coming Spring,—
are now gently transmitting through their porous
texture, the healthful rain that feeds what it once
poisoned ; and that as every shower ceases, then
comes ^ rich after-gift of atmospheric air fol-
lowing in a thousand sinuosities the threadlike
channels down which the rain, like a pioneer, has
fouiid and led the way through the soil, to the
very drain, three or four feet below the surfiwje.
What a thought is this, to those who know it,
and have earned its pleasure I

Nature abkarg a vacuum. True, most true,
philosophic chemist ! Where the drop ha« o^oe

A WOED AT FABTINa. 89

disa{)peared tkrougli the soil, it has dragged the
air after it, and with the air, its burthen of medi-
cament, food, and temperature, down to the once
sluggish and unawakened subsoil that never felt
its animating touch before.

" Oh ! Sir ! it's a fine thing, is this here drain-
ing," said an old labourer, lifting up one heavy
foot on the ledge of his spade, and composing
himself with his elbow resting on the handle, to
say a few words, before he put his jacket on and
parted for the night.

" It's a fine thing is this here draining : what
a crop o' Turnips '11 be here next Autumn, I'll
be bound to say ! "

Of aU things I like to catch the toiler in his
spare but hearty moment of contemplation. The
utterance of an abstract thought or reflection ia
never so precious as when it struggles from the
lips of one whose frame is almost bent double
with the hard practicality of daily labour, I
prize it beyond wordsi.

" It M a glorious thing," replied I ; " the more
X see of its effects, the more I like it, and the
more I wonder how the land was ever worked
before without it."

" Ah ! weU, Sir, 'twas a different sort of thing
you see,-^'t was like a different iyraade. Lor'

90 CHEONICLES OF A CLAY FABM.

blesh you, I remember the time when after
Wheat-sowing was done (and* sometimes there
was many fields so as it couldn't be got in at all,
when it came a wet season) the farmer's work
was over like, for the year. There was nothing
to be done but sit at home and go to sleep, till
the Frost came, and the dung-cart could be got
a-field. It was bad work, sir, for the labourer-
bad work — ^when he was turned off for the winter,
and had to look out for a bit o' hedging or ditch-
ing somewhere else, miles off perhaps, to get a
bit o* bread by."

" WeU, we've changed that however ; I think
I may truly say that every year, to me, Wiuter
has been a busy time."

" And it will be too ! There'll never be stand-
ing still for winter work again on this here farm,
as long as ever it Hes out o' doors, let who will
farm it ! for all so many hedges are grubbed up.
How the Swedes have growwd, to be sure, on
that piece as we drained last year ! I never saw
Ship look better : and I remember when there
wasn't a ship on the farm, or a Turnip on the
ground to feed *em with."

" D' ye think that piebe will stand the treading
of the sheep P"

"Bear it! Lor' blesh you, it'll come up as

A WOED AT PAETINQ. 91

mellow as a garden, I'll war'n' it, in the spring :
it treads a Httle leathery in some places in the
middle o' the lands, but that'U aU come right after
another crop: it donH all come at once arter
d/raAning ; every year teUs on it."

" You think that reaUy is the case ?"

" Think ! I hnowws it. Sir. I likes it every
year the better arter the draining : but I do think
(no offence,) that you goes a little too dip with
the tUes : it is no use going so dip irdo the clay'*

" What, three feet ! Why they laugh at me
for draining so shallow! If you were to see what
they say in those Papers I bring iato the field
sometimes in a morning, you wouldn't call this
deep." —

"Oh! never you listen to what them there
papers says: they know nothing in the Varsal
world about it. They beent practical farmers as
writes that stuff: none o' them as writes knows
anything about farming."

" D'ye think not P WeU, but now suppose I
were to write about the fields we have drained,
and send it to some of those Editor men to print
and put in the paper, would n't it do for some-
body else to read : would n't it be as true after
it was in print as it was before, when we were
doing itP"

92 CHBOKICLES OF A CLAT FABH.

'' Oil, that's a different thing, that is ; 'caose of
course they'd believe what you say "

" Well, now — ^suppose I were to put it as a
sort of history of this Farm, as it was, and as it
is, — a sort of chronicle — call it the ' Chronicle of
a Clay Farm '—P"

'' Oh, that's capital ! Lord how I should like
to see it : that 'ouLd be summat like, that would!
none o' them there long words about Chemists
and Druggists and Doctor's stuff, as if farmera
was a parcel o' hold women, like my poor old
Miggi2g ■ oh ! thank you kindly Sir for what

you sent her, it did her a sight o' good, she was
able to eat her yittles better arterwards than
she's done for many a day — "

" But you won't believe I can doctor the field
and give thcU an appetite, eh DobsonP"

" Well, I don't know — I ben't no scoUard, Sir
-*one thing however, you've ta{pped the dropsy
on it, for one thing, that 's sartin ! "

"And you'll believe the other when you've
seen it. Well, good night, Dobson 1 "

And with a hearty 'good night' in return,
trudges poor old Dobson home from his hard and
wet day's work, with none the heavier heart or
less elastic tread for a few cheery words to en-
liven the dull blank of the body's labour, and

A WOBP AT PASTING. 93

inuminate for a moment that hateM chasm that
lies too broad and forbidding between employer
and employed, in civilized England.

When will this stain depart from our land?
When will that moody silence and reserve that
disconnects rank from rank, and class from class,
and man from his brother man, cease to shut
US up from each other's view, like sealed pac-
qnets of humanity, destined and directed ', pri-
vate and confidential* each to its own special
clique and circle, locking up the cheap yet glad-
dening benevolence of words fit)m all * below*
itP

If man, vain aspiring man, did but truly mea-
sure the resilient influences for good or ill, by
which his own existence is surrounded ; if he did
but know the rich freight of happiness and of
positive blessing to his poorer and humbler bre-
thren, which he bears within him in the mere
gift of language. If instead of reserving all his
soft words for the rich, and the caressing of the
tongue for those who least require or value it, he
w^ould stoop to remark its instant eflect, and 'per-
fnanent infltierice for good, on those who seldomest
receive it, how changed would be the working
out of that strange problem of society which is
ever leaving the largest numbers most uncared

94 CHRONICLES OF A CLAY FABM.

for, their power and influence only felt when it
is dangerous.*

Of all the sweeteners of human toil, of all the
motive powers that give alacrity to the hand or
foot, readiness to the wiU, intelligence to mind
and purpose, the quickest and the most enduring
in result is the kind *word spoken in season.'
"How good is it!" exclaims the Wisest of the
sons of men. The most boorish obduracy melts

* An event, of almost national gnei, which occurred
at the moment when the (present) Third Edition of
this Uttle work was preparing for the press, may be
permitted to fiimish a not unapt appendage to the
words in the text, words which had met the eye, and re-
ceived the earnest acquiescence, of the distinguished man
and deeply-regarded friend who is the subject of the
following notice. * Staffordy March 13. Mr. Jmstioe
Talfomrd presided in the Crown Comrt. He had re-
viewed the Calendar, and was directing the attention
of the Grand Jury to the number of serious offencses it
contained '

" These crimes," he remarked, " come, I will not say
exclusively but in the great majority of cases, from
those districts wliich are the richest in mineral treasures,
where wages are high, and where no temptation of want
can for a moment be set up as an excuse or palliation
for them : on the contrary I have observed, in the long
experience I have had of the calendars of prisoners
tried at these assizes, that in times of comparative pri-
vation crime diminishes, and that when wages are high
and are earned by a less degree of work, there is a

A WOED AT PAIITING. 95

at last xinder its repeated influence, though hard
and rough at first as the unsmelted ore. Horse-
power is convenient of appliance, Wind and Wa-
ter power are cheap, the power of Steam is great,
the sordid power of Money greater still ; but of
all the powers that be, to rid the tiny weed, or
fell the stubborn oak, the greatest is that which
can gear on mind to matter — ^the wokd and look

of KINDNESS.

strong temptation to spend them in TiciouB indul-
gences, and that crime has increased almost in propor-
tion to the state of prosperity by which the criminals
have been surrounded.

" This consideration should awaken in all our minds,
and especially the minds of gentlemen connected with
those districts, to see in what direction to search for
the remedy for so great an eviL It is untrue to say
that the state of education in these districts is below
the general average : then we must search among some
other causes for the peculiar aspect of crime presented
in these cases. I cannot help myself thinking it may
be in no small degree attributable to that separation
between class and class, which is the great curse of
British Society, and for which we are all more or less
in our respective spheres in some degree responsible,
and which is more complete in these than in agricul-
tural districts, where the resident gentry are enabled
to shed around them the blessings resulting from the
exercise of benevolence, and the influence and example
of active kindness. I am afraid we all of us keep too
much aloof from those beneath us, and whom we thus

96 CHRONICLES 07 A. CLAT FABM.

encourage to look upon us with suspicion and dislike.
Eyen to our servants we thiivk perhaps we fulfil our
duty when we perform our contract with them, when
we pay them their wages and treat them with the ci-
vility consistent with our habits and feeUngs, when we
curb our temper and use no violent expressions tovrards
them. But how painM is the thought that there are
men and women growing up around us, ministering to
our comforts and necessities, continual inmates of our
dwellings, with whose affections and nature we are as
much unacquainted as if they were the inhabitants of
some other sphere! This feeling, arising from that
kind of reserve peculiar to the English character, does,
I think, greatly tend to prevent that mingling of class
with class, that reciprocation of kind words and gentle
affections, gracious admonitions and kind inquiries,
which, often more than any book education, tend to the
culture of the affections of the heart, the refinement and
elevation of the character of those to whom they are
addressed. And if I were to be asked what is the great
want of English Society — to mingle class with class —
I would say in one word the want is the want of Sym-
pathy. . . ." While uttering these noble sentiments
his head fell on one side.

" The latest breath of one whose whole life was kind-
ness,* was thus spent in a solemn enforcement of the
duty of kindness to others. He was urging upon his
countrymen, on behalf of the fallen and the felling,
the need in which we all stand of ' a reciprocation of
kind words and gentle affections,' when his voice was
hushed for ever.

" Noble indeed would such a doctrine have been, and |

* Examiner^ March 18, 1854.

^ A WOED AT PAETING. 97

most fit to be delivered, if it had been no more than it
waa meant to be, a voice of mercy from the judgment
seat : a voice oi justice perhaps more true than speaks
in many a judicial sentence. He was discharging his
of&dal duty, but he was urging not less, ^he lesson of
his own generous life, when he attributed the frequency
of crimes to the denial of that best education which is
given by the sympathy that should exist between high
and low, by the active kindnesses and the gracious ad-
monitions that ought to bind us more nearly to classes
firom which English habits of reserve keep ua now too
proudly aloof. He was speaking that which he knew,
and his breath, after the grave utterance of that warn-
ing, could not expire in a strain more sweetly accordant
with the whole life's music that had gone before.

" That such should he the end was the Will of God ;
and never did robed and ermined judge, dying thus in
open court m fulfilment of his duty, meet a death so
like that of a hero. With Talfourd's name the memory
of that last hour will never cease to Hve. It will re-
main on earth and be a fruitful source of Good : and
there is a pause in sorrow when we think that it will
be remembered too in Heaven."

H

[SECOND SERIES.]

XIII.
^FAEM TO LET.'

The town of Bogmoor is not famous in History :
nor indeed geograpliically. It may not perhaps
have challenged a very responsible amount of
public notice hitherto, either for its own merits
in general, or for that reflected virtue in particu-
lar, which has cast a queer distinction upon
Marlborough, Wellington, and a few other 'small
towns with great names' that might be men-
tioned ; and that sometimes are mentioned, with
a yawn of careless wonder, why * Duke of Blen-
heim ' and * Duke of Waterloo ' would n't hare
done as well, — ^perhaps better, than tying on
the name of an obscure town to the laurels of the
hero, like a penny ribbon on a prize Longhorn.
But however, that is not the present subject,-^
indeed as far firom it as possible, — ^for the real
point was to show that whatever the world a*

'FABH TO LBT.' 99

large imgbit saj or think, or not say or think at
all, about Bogmoor, it had a comfortable kind of
self-opinion of its own that amply outbalanced
all public indifference. Indeed the place was
utterly chloroformed against any such sensibili-
ties, and was quite of the opposite way of think-
ing; reminding one of those people often met
with, who for some cabinet reason that never can
be got at, seem to view every object in life Uirough
that lens by which the dilated eye of the drunkard
is said to make everything he meets look small.
As you walked or rode up its one long flat dull
straggling street, it was strange to remark the
contrast between the street itself and the faces
that met you in it. How upon earfch so much
self-satis£Eu;tion had ever been got together in so
unsatisfactory a spot, was the indefinite wonder
that was stirred afresh in the mind by every
object that met one*s eye. The very curs pop-
ping extemporaneously out of wet narrow alleys,
imaged, while partaking of, the character of the
place, cocking up head and tail as you passed,
and exerting both together in one short * Who
are youP* bark of indescribable impudence.

Whether in aggravation, or explanation, of the
whole scene one can hardly undertake to say, —
but there was one large bow-window visible a

100 CHBONICLBS OF A CULT FABM.

long way up the street and down the street — and
indeed up and down another street too, (the only
attempt at a cross street there was,) for it was a
comer window, commanding therefore at a glance
all the news of the town.

Ay ! and a deal more too ! Its wide look-out
was, like the little dogs just observed upon, sym-
bolic as weU as actual. It was the News-
room, Eeading-room, Petty-Sessions-room, Lite-
rary- and- Scientific-room, Farmers'- Club-room,
and a great many other rooms besides, that there
is not time to tell. Enough to say that the
smallest pin ever manufactured could hardly have
alighted point downwards on the floor of that
room — ^metaphorically to speak — ^but everybody
heard it ten miles round, and could tell you the
shape size colour and manufacturer's name with-
in the twenty-four hours: and that waa short
time in those days.

I shall not describe that room or its bow-
window any farther. I conceive that the heaps
of newspapers, with the noses and spectacles
poring over them, and the polished mahogany
tables, to sit and read them at in the windows,
so as to command the news inside and outside,
are sufficiently visible to all average minds'-eyes
without more specification.

*FABH TO LET.' 101

^ow it happened that at the top of a column
in the adyertisement-page of the Wetland Mer-
cury which was lying fresh and damp from the
press, and casting a hazsy pattern of itself upon
the polish of one of those same mahoganies, there
appeared one Saturday morning in the autumn
of the year Eighteen-hundred-and-thirty some-
thing, a short dab of an advertisement in the
following spasmodic phraseology : —

"Wetlandshiee. — ^Farm to let; on Lease.
250 acres. One third Meadow and Pasture.
Has been drained and otherwise unproved in the
hands of the proprietor. Capital required, 10/.
to the acre. Application, to Messrs. Penn and
Debbitt, Bogmoor, Wetlandshire."

" I say, Mr. Bowles, have you seen this Farm
that's advertised here P"

— said a gentleman sitting in the window, to
another gentleman, in deep perusal at the fire-
place, of which he had taken sole seisin, holding
it by the hobs — ^with his feet.

" Yes : — No : What is it : " said the voice from
the fireplace, uninquiriugly, and smothered in a
' leading article.'

" Why here's a Farm of two hundred and fifty
acres to let * drained <md otherwise improved hy

102 CHB0NICLE8 OF A CLAT FABM.

the proprietor,* I wonder whose it is : that's
just the sort of fann young What's- 'is-name was
wanting — that 'ou'd just suit him, wouldn't itP"

" WeU, what is his name," returned the other
voice, uninquiringly again, and never looking
up.

" Why young— K)h ! what is his name — ^I shall
forget my own soon " — (a grunt fipom the fire-
place) " — ^young Leejohn, you know him. You
don't mean to say you don't know him ?"

" I didn't say I didn't," answered Mr. Bowles
with provoking gravity of iteration, bent upon
giving the smallest modicum of intellect to any-
thing else till he had finished his ' leader : ' which
having just accomplished he starts up, lets go the
hobs, and parting his coat-tails, turns round, and
again takes possession of the fire; indescribably ;
and waking up to the subject, asks,

" But how can he take it r you said 10^. to the
acre didn't you P He hasn't the money. {* Le-
gion ' indeed 1)

"'ordbleshye!"

Added to a tosa up of the chin out of the cra-
vat, to give emphans to the middle word, this in-
vocation conveyed all the answer that was heard,
to the difficulty started by Mr. Bowles. What
the exact meaning was that lay wrapped up in

*FABM TO LET.' 103

the blessing — ^whether it was peremptorily fa-
vourable to young Leejobn's peciiniosity, or
eoncluflive of some indiflference attaching in toto
to the inquiry, has remained dark to the present
day. The subject fell,* strangled by some larger
topic of news-room discussion : and the Chronicle
is without a scholiast.

Two or three days after the appearance of this
epigrammatic annoimcement in the * Mercury/ a
thick and weighty-looking pacquet, directed in
what may for contradistinction's sake, be called
'Square-text,' might be seen lying upon the
margin of a breakfast table on which lay also an
admired disorder of newspapers, books, farm ac-
counts, and coffee-cups. The room itself in which
the table stood is just worth a moment's notice
before anybody comes in. Small, oakrpannelled,
and too square for good proportion, it was
crammed, in every comer and upon every table
with miscellaneous piles of articles which seemed
to have grown together by degrees iu spite of
original incongruity, and become reconciled at
last, after the manner of other foes, by lying
under the same dust. * Indoor ' and * out-o'-door'
seemed to contend for the mastery all over the
room : if you looked into the comers you might
have fancied yourself in a garden tool-house, if

104 CHRONICLES OF A CLAY FABM.

you looked on the mantel-piece you thought of a
chemist's shop : four dried lumps of soil, as hard
as stones, lay at one end of it on separate pieces
of ex-white paper, and through their coating of
dust feebly indicated the 'three primary colours,
blue red and yellow, with a sort of grey for the
fourth. Over several tiers of news-papers between
the windows, at the ftirther end of the room lay
at full length two * new and improved ' Drama^e-
levels, — out of Spirit though, — for each was care-
fully tied up with a direction card to the maker :
* rejected addresses' evidently. Odd combina-
tions, unmeaning and half meaning, disported
themselves over the concision of the little den :
the end of a large pruning-knife peered out be-
tween the sheets of a new half-cut volume marked
'Dendrology, 'suggesting something about Theory
and Practice, and clearly exhibiting, by the jagged
leaves, the moral as well as physical truth, that
sharp knives are bad paper cutters. An old
quarto volume of Baleigh's History of the World,
in black letter, lay open on a little table near the
fireplace, with a bimdle of Cigars and some pa-
pers of Potato-seed on one page ; — and a small
sharp Axe on the other. A whetstone lay near, •
and a drop of blood, along the edge, had left
mark of some awkwardness or haste and had

*FABM TO LET.* 105

smeared the page below with an ugly red line
just under the word (ffiratitaJJe. Except a tolerably
wellfilled book-case too much stuffed with stitched
Eioports and periodicals, there was nothing else
noticeable in the general medley, excepting an in-
genious atrocity in the shape of an easy chair,
with a traversing desk and a shaded reading
lamp screwed into one of the arms. A wood fire
had burnt out in the hearth, leaving the ends of
the brands reclined despondingly against the fire-
dogs, — old-fashioned biped articles, which reared
each a neck and head of silver, by way of focal
ornament and finish, and which people who came
on business always fixed their eyes upon, and at
some convenient pause registered their approval
of, in a tone that took some credit for originality
of taste.

The windows looked eastward, and the sun
was shining in : the weighty-looking pacquet had
not been long on the table before the door opened,
and a shooting-jacket, waistcoat, and trowsers,
all of the same pattern, entered the room : a cup
of coffee was hastily poured out, and the seal of
the pacquet broken. A quantity of letters fell
out ; one of which ran as follows.

"Dear Sir, — ^We enclose to you applications
for Farm, marked 1 to 14, of which be pleased to

106 CHB0NICLB8 OF A CLAT FABH.

retam those joti wish answered. Six parties called
yesterday, wishing to inspect personally and haTe
refusal of same. We will forward you fuTther
particulars to-morrow.

" We are, Sir, yours very truly,

" Pbnn and Dbbbitt."

* Marked one to fourteenr—^lus six ' muttered
the owner of the shooting-jacket, slowly puttmg
down the letter amongst the others, seating him-
self in the arm-chair and swallowing the Moil's
half of the first cup of coffee. * Two days* notice
— " no ! not so much ; not two " — and twen^ op-
plications. — Hmm ! *

Haying delivered himself of this reflection i^th
that deliberate and abstracted utterance betoken-
ing more thought than syllables, he gradnaUy
feU into a posture — ^the head upon the hand and
the elbow on the chair-arm — ^which indicates that
state of mind — deriring its name from the cloven
footed race, who patiently swallow things twice
over, dining at one hour and chewing at another,
— ^ydept Euminating.

' And so, my poor old Farm, I must now bid
you farewell. I who have taken your part throngh
good and iU report,— know the course of every
drain and could find blindfold every weeping out-
flow that has wrought so fair a change in your

'VABM TO LET.' 107

once untoward look, and ill name : earth's tears
of penitence and Promise ! I who have taught
you by anxious toil through many a long dull
day that serene and smiling look you wear this
lovely momiag, which even in your plaia face
betokens something good at heart. Well ! may
he who wins deserve, — as many a sad heart has
said, after all its watchful care, in cases not alto-
gether dissimilar. — ^Now let us see something of
the suitors!'

This last remark seemed to have reference to
the heap of letters ' marked 1 to 14,' but before
the action could be suited to the word, it was ar-
rested by something which aforetime has arrested
a good many words and actions : a gentle kxock
at the door.

XIV.

AN 'APPLICATION/

If there is one class of mind in the world with
& native antipathy to improyement, there is an-
other and much more really mischievous, that
seems ever destined to caricature it. As every
animal, however noxious and seenungly useless,
has its appointed prey, so do the natoral enemies
of all scientific advancement in their own art,
trade, or calling, whatever that may be, find a
never failing source of triumph and enjoyment
in cracking the bones of blundering Enthusiasts
who dog the path of progressing Truth, like dis-
torting shadows, throwing her calm clear profile
against each passing object, in every variety of
burlesqued and ridiculous outline. It has puzzled
philosophers of limited patience and observa-
tion, to reflect upon this fact : forgetting, or ne-
ver having noticed, the gentle-handed tolerance

AX *AP:PLICATIOJr/ 109

which marks the parent-discipline of Nature,
over her inter-squabbhng and mutually-intole-
rant children, they wonder she interferes so sel-
dom, and with such mild half-measures, to rescue
her beleaguered sons if not from the foes in front,
at least from the fools behind that go bleating
about, exaggerating every fact, like street-news-
mongers ; dressed in the hvery of science, like a
moilkey in regimentals, and understanding and
appreciating the language they talk at second-
hand, as much as the organ-grinder does the opera-
tune his winch works threadbare.

A good sohd impenetrable advocate of old-
fashioned ignorance, falling foul of one of these
light gentry, snaps him up at a mouthful ; and
no harm done neither : but the mischief hes in
the corollary — * So much for your Science! '

Agriculture has had enough of this, and some-
thing to spare. Counterfeits of every sort and
shape have crowded at the heels of every im-
provement, every invention, every good sugges-
tion, every new manure; till Art and Science
are weU-nigh ashamed of the sound of their own
names, aud are fain to wear smock-fro|}cs for in-
cognito. The plague that has reached its height
in the present decade, was beginning its infective
process in the last, of our nineteenth century.

110 CHfiONICLSS OF A CLAY FARM.

It knocked that gentle knock at the door that
ended a former chapter of our chronicle ; and it
wtm ushered in, (as what plague is not P) in ihe
most pleasing and attractive form imaginable.

Avery young and firesh-looking little personage,
very smartly dressed, having sat himself down,
and got pretty well at ease in the course of a pre-
liminary announcement that he had ridden over
thus early in consequence of a visit to Meisn.
Penn and Debbitt on the previous day ; without
giving much occasion of reply, proceeded to de-
liver himself of a little harangue of which the
world at large having already been delayed the
benefit, some ten or fifteen years, must now con-
tent itself with an abstract.

It appeared — ^firom this discourse — that Agri-
culture was a most inter»**ting hart — ^but quite
in its Amfancy — quite entirely so. The farmers
were a very hignorant class, and knew nothing
whatever about it — nothing what-hever. The
land did not produce enough by arf— -not a quar-
ter what it bought to deu. Summer fallering was
a shocking waste of time and expense : a pair of
'orses w«e enough to plough the stiffest land-
to any depth. Farm-yard dung was good for
nothing. Gfo-anner was the -thing ; and the four*
course system, which no landlord ought to allow

AK >PPLICATI01T.' Ill

his tenants to adopt hany other. Six feet deep
and forty yards wide was decidedly the proper
depth and distance for drains, and if the cky
was well stamped down upon the tile this would
drain the wettest land hamply and effectchaUy.
But no 'agriculturist* could be expected to lay
out his capital in these improvements without a
Xjeafle — ^nineteen years at least, as they ave in
Scotland. With a demand of which — ^after many
other useful hints about Game, &c., the lecturer^
concluded his remarks; offering to exemplify
them in his own little person upon this identical
•day Farm.'

The stupid old chronicler meanwhile — (the
wearer of the shooting jacket before-mentioned)
during this eloquent outpouring, seemed some-
how to have got into the clouds. During the
first half of it, he had never taken eyes or ears
off the speaker ; when at length he did, it was
only to put his hand and handkerchief over the
former, so that they were quite buried, though
once or twice a keen observer, not himself ora-
toricaUy engaged, might have just perceived a
very slight spasm or convulsion of the figure,
and a sudden redness of the temples over the
edge of the kerchief; but the momentary cough,
or sneeze, or whatever it was that ailed or choked

112 CHEONICLES OF A CJiAY FARM.

liiin, passed away ; — ^and when the address was
over that had been charming so long and wisely,
he looked slowly up, like a person whose thoughts
had been wandering far away, and must be re-
called like a lot of stray heifers, before he could
put the question —

" Have you farmed extensively, Mr. "

"No, Sir ; not exactly — at least — ^not myself
as yet ; but I've seen a good deal of agriculture ;
that is, IVe been over some of the most cele-
brated agricultural establishments, that of Mr.
Speedwell in Netherlandshire — the Eev. Mr.
Forcechalk's Farm on the Highdowns : I've been
over Lord Burytile's Drainage-works in !North
Dampshire, with his Lordship's steward ; and I
am familiar with Mr. Mac Scuffler's great con-
cern in Inthemess-shire, N. B. — I know Mr. Mac
Scuffler very well. By the way, I presume, Sir,
you aUow a tenant to take hout?**

"I beg your pardon P "

"You would allow me, I say, to take out — a'
I'm not much of a sportsman myself, but if a
friend should come — "

"A certificate — oh ! I understand : You

've seen the Scotch farming then P did you study
long with Mr. Mac Scuffler P"

"Oh 1 no : it wasn't to study : I often go and

AN 'APPLICATION.* 113

stay with Jmn : ah 1 that is farming ! He hasn't
an acre of grasshmd : not a bit except the grass-
plot before his door, and he says he shouldn't
keep that except to wipe his shoes on."

" Ah ! well : We are rather proud of our dairy
pastures though, here. Are you married Mr.
P Excuse my — "

" Not yet Sir, but I'm going to be. It's on
that account I'm going to farm. I've a thou*
sand pounds of my own; and She — that is —
her aunt, who died lately, left her a thousand
pounds ; rather more I beheve — so we shall have
plenty to begin upon. Mr. Mac Scuffler has
promised to send me a Scotch plough and four
capital horses, — Clevelands — such steppers! you'd
be astonished to see the rate they go over the
ground."

"Are her family connected with — ^with * Agri-
culture,* — ^is her father a — "

"A Farmer P oh ! no. He was in trade : but
he is dead: she was living with her aunt till
lately."

A few moments' pause ensued : the free youth-
ftd expression of self-confidence on the face of
the speaker contrasting curiously with the some-
what puzzled and painful thoughtfulness ex-
pressed by the other party to this brisk dialogue.

114 CHBOKICLSS OF A CLAY FARM.

This expression however suddenly clianged —
and getting up and going to the book case, he
pulled out, as if in reference to the discussion
just pending — a thick quarto Tolume ; and having
blown a little cloud of dust from it into the fire-
place, and rapping it together once or twice, ap-
parently to complete the purgation, he walked
up and quietly laid it down open before his
visitor.

" Would you oblige me by reading me a page
of thisP"

The other stared — " Eead this ! why gracious
me. Sir ; I can't ! Why, it's Greek or Latin or
somethin' ! "

** Three lines will do."

" I can't, Sir, really ! I couldn't read a word
of it if you'd give me the world ! "

"One single Hne."

" I can't indeed ! I never learnt a word o*
this stuff."

** An agricultural author too ! His name is
Theophrastus. It's all about Wheat, Beans —
Egyptian beans — ^the same you buy at Mark-lane
kiln-dried, and all sorts of other plants and ve-
getables. Surely you can read it P "

" Not if all I have in the world depended on
it ! I never learnt the alphabet ! "

AN 'application/ 115

" Thank you, my yotuig friend — that's an ho-
nest answer. Now observe : you are going to
pledge 'all you have in the world/ and all that
Somebody else has too— that you can fa/rm ; and
youVe never learnt the alphabet! The task
you see before you in that book, and think so
difficult, is but the acquirement of a few years ;
the other is the labour— of a life— of many lives
— and not learnt yet. I'm not joking, believe
me. I speak seriously ; I've burnt daylight and
candlelight — a fair share, over both. Wht^ do you
think — ^why does everybody think — ^that he can
farm without having learnt how; that agricul-
ture (if you like that word best) is an exception
to evert/ other human labour or pursuit, a con-
tradiction to aU Natural Law, and will bring a
livelihood without study, cost or apprenticeship :
that to be able to gabble over the pet jargon
about the 'hignorance' of our forefathers — "

The old Chronicler was warming up — and be-
ginning to lurch about in his chair like a grain-
laden Dutchman clearing out of harbour ; — ^but
a look of something in the other's face just hap-
pened to catch his eye — a look that somehow can
break down — and go right through a barred and
bolted door better than artillery and powder-
bags — ^a look that trips up anger and makes it

116 CHEONICLES OF A CLAt FABM.

faU flat on its face — that melts argninents into a
jelly — a sort of look between simplicity and peni-
tence — a slight quiver about the mouth as of
a child convicted in a first fault —

The steam was turned off in an instant — ^the
safety valve opened of its own accord : that pre-
cious valve that the Grreat Author has placed in
the inner heart of man, no matter how many
rough coats are wrapped over it —

" Come, come ! We'll make a bargain after all.
An early visit deserves to do business. You're
still yoimg — very young. Take a word of
advice from an old head. Go to your friend
Mr. Mac Scuffler — ask him to take you for two
or three years : — ^it's soon gone. "Work away for
dear life at his farm, and make him tell you all
he knows. Fancy that it is tfour money instead
of his that buys every ton of manure he spends.
Put off your wedding a little bit : She*ll be con-
stant if you are : and come to me three years
hence ; I wa^ as yoimg as you once ; and when
you're as old as I am you won't repent my ad-
vice. I'U look out something by that time that
win suit you better than this. "

There was a shaking of hands. A promise
on both sides : The door closed : and the mo-
mentary flush of warmth fell away from a pair

AN 'APPLICATION.' 117

of old cheeks, like a red oak-leaf from the bare
bough of November, as the letters 'marked 1
to 14* were slowly taken iip one by one, and
glanced at with the leaden eye of habitade.

XV.

*LAJS^DLOED AND TENANT/

To people of that happily constituted mind in
which the hope and faith in the moral progress
of our race, and the sanguine watching of its
slow-creeping evidences, Aimish a continual, al-
beit a slender, banquet, — ^whose patient and far-
reaching charity may be truly said to "feed upon
air, promise-crammed ;" it must Aimish an oc-
casional, and not infrequent pang of almost de-
spondency to witness how slightly, how remotely
the best remarks of the best philosophers, the
most practical advice of the most practical mo-
ralists, does actually reach, touch, affect, enter
into, or flavour the reciprocal thoughts and ac-
tions of men in the working-day routine of * busi-
ncss* life. Business is the word, business is the
excuse, business is the conventional and accepted
basis, for a code of human action, as unlike and

\

'LANDLORD AND TENANT.* 119

opposed to what is declared, and believed, to be
conducive to true happiness in every other depart-
ment of life, as Monday's conversation is some-
times at variance with the feelings and resolu-
tions experienced at the close of Sunday's sermon.
It is as long ago as the days of Charles II.
that in one of these same 'Sunday sermons* a re-
mark was made which has not only travelled down
safely to our own time, but enjoyed the more re-
markable truth-stamp of instant activity in its
own, in being carried away by two listeners, who
the following day met each other half-way to
shake hands, and settle by a little mutual con-
cession, some matter that had long kept them
wide apart. The remark was that "Selfishnesse
seeking but its own simshine is blynded, look-
ynge on the light ; but wisdome, like a true
archer, tumeth his back to the sunne, and let-
ting the light ftll upon the object, taketh the
steadier and surer aym : and thus should he who
seeketh his long happiness consider well the pos-
ture of his neighbour, and placing himself therein,
look back as it were upon his own; and most
surely, after due habit (for the tryal is at first of
difficult empryse), he shall find the whole matter
between them such as one may presently know
wherein the due correction lyeth.**

120 CHBONICLES OF A CLAY FABM.

To those complicate relations of life in whicli
there is at once antagonism qf interest yet mu-
tuality of object ; to that relation (for present
instance) implied by the words 'Landlord and
Tenant,' how close, how admirably apposite
seems the quaint rule laid down by the good
old churchman ! 'Place yourself in your neigh-
bour's position,' he seems to say (though indeed
his language needs no paraphrase), 'and look
back upon yourself from that point : the thing
is dificult, and there is little danger of your
getting too perfect in the art of looking on
your interest with your neighbour's eyes. lict
the Antagonism between you be for the time
imaginary, the Mutuality real. So will you
see your own best interest and happiness in
truer light and leisure, by taking your neigh-
bour's judgment, even for his own ends, into
council with your own.' •

The too frequent practice is to do the exaot
reverse : to realize the antagonism, and make the
mutuality a fiction and a humbug. What the
effect is — first upon the soil, secondly upon the
labourer, and thirdly on the public wealth,
wherever this mistaken system has been long in
operation, let him say who has seen a coimtry, a
district, or even a single acre which has been the

•landlord and tenant.' J 21

arena of pure unmitigated selfishness, on the part
of its Owners and Occupiers, and all who come
between the two. The signs are not easily mis-
takeable ; — ^beggared labourers, beggared parish-
fdnds, and beggared public finances can be recog-
nised afar. They reach every sense : the eye can
see it, the ear can hear it, the nose can smeU it,
the hands can handle it. In time the perception
reaches the iwner senses : and the mind begins to
understand that this corruption is the work of
mistaken selfishness. The social laws of Nature
press gently and agreeably around a man, till he
offends them by long neglect, and the selfish no-
tion that they can be starved and stinted, harm-
lessly. Then they come in force : and evince
their presence and reality by pain, instead of
pleasure. Then the great problems of society
begin to work themselves out under high pres-
sure.

In the early stages of the world they are sim-
ple enough. When every man tilled, his own
field, the duties of Landlord and Tenant needed
sniaU. definition. But advancement complicates
relations : presently the time comes when you
begin to see one man cultivating the soil of an-
other : and that not only without wages, but pay-
ing the owner for leave an^ license! Mouths

122 CHBONICLBS OF A CLAY FABM.

have increased upon the land ; but the land mea-
sures the same. Acres don't grow. New indo-
sure eases the pressure for awhile ; and like the
rising water-mark of a flood, the plough-line steals
up the mountain-side — ^higher — and higher yet,
— ^it grates upon the bare rock — and stops. But
what has happened meanwhile in the rich yaUey ?
Industry, skill, perseverance, prudence, self de-
nial, far-sightedness, — all, some, or one of these
qualities have made indiyiduals~-K)r their lucky
heirs — owners of more than they can cultivate
themselves. The last bit of moor or mountain-
side was the measure of the extreme point at
which cultivation would pay : that bit, ha.ngiTig
between earth and heaven, in more than one
sense, was the balancing-point, the test qf culti-
vabilittf. It just pays for tillage ; and nothing
more. A man perchance may ask your leave to
dig or plough it : but for that leave he offers you
no return — no Beddendum — ^in modem English,
no Ebnt.

Here then is the origin of that curious thing
whose definition has sorely puzzled the Political
Economists. And well may it have puzzled :
for it is the basis of one of the most complicate
and peculiar relations that has come to exist be-
tween man and man. Mutuality of object, anta*

* LANDLORD AND TENANT.' 123

gonism of interest, upon the same gronnd, raiee
a demand nx>on each of the parties for one of the
most difficult things that human nature can be
asked for — modified self-interest. It is easy to
say that Land may be let like a House, or a
Wharf. So it may. But with the mere lease
ends all the similitude ; except such as lies be-
tween dead stone walls shaped and laid together
by human hands, and the living teeming earth
whose fertile bosom is impregnate with the per-
petual action of a life-producing agency » We
talk of the 'constituents of the soil,' and some-
thing we may know of them : but who can un-
ravel the wondrous tale of their intercourse and
inter-action, or bind them captive to the dry co-
venants of a motive-chiUing lease P So may a
leaf or a flower be 'manufactured,' or an animal
'carved* in wood or stone : but they are deficient
in that one element which was said to have reached
its acme from human art when the watch was*
heard ticking in the pocket of the dead soldier.

In a word, brick-and-mortar walls, lath-and-
plaster partitions, oak floors, and marble chimney
pieces, are dead things, the fitting subjects of a
dead contract : but there is a still l\fe, a re-
bounding vitality for good or iU in the Soil, —
the glorious handywork of a higher manufacture

124 CHBOKICLBS OF A CLAY PABM.

— ^that will hardly brook the dull eloth of sleeping
partnership. Not organized itself, it is yet the
active source of organism. Its gifts come to man
dMiy-laden. To take the one without tlie other
is, in the long run, impossible. And curiously
enough, the Earth is herself the first witness of
a breach of the duties she devolves on and be-
tween those who cultivate, or inherit, her gifts,
as she was of the earliest wrong committed be-
tween man and his brother man. She speaks,
with most miraculous organ ; and tells you the
character of the cultivator, or the proprietor, or
both, as plainly as your eyes may choose to read
it.

Take a walk through an Allotment-ground. To
an expert eye, does not each little oblong plot of
land, with its varied produce, care, culture, and
condition, tell its separate tale, as if the soil were
the destined mirror of the hand and mind of
*manP Does it need the voice or ^g&t of the
showman to point out the characteristics of the
several occupants F Here there is industry, there
idleness ; here again there is hard labour, with-
out skiU or knowledge ; there you have experi-
mental attempts, despising established practice
over much, and ending in failure : here again is
toil Qver-tasked and struggling against want of

*LANDLOED AND TENANT.' 125

means — tlie spade without the dung-fork — a hard
and pitiless struggle ; there plenty of manure-
heaps, but wastefiiUy and unevenly applied : here
a.gain is loss of time upon too close a minuteness
and pettiness of culture, there too large and dar-
ing a system, which risks the whole space upon a
single crop. Every variety and sub-variety of cha-
racter is self-drawn and pictured on the soil, a
photographic portrait of the cultivator. And
BO it is upon that great ADotment-field — could
one but as easily look over it — the Farms spread^
border-to-border, over the various geological sys-
tems of England, Scotland, and Ireland.
* * * #

To this same wide Field, with its many modes
of tillage, its various kinds of produce, and equally
varied character both of occupation and of owner-
ship, insensibly flew the thoughts of the puzzled
reader of a certain budget of fourteen letters,
and of another about the same in dimension,
which the following post brought from the punc-
tual Messrs. Penn and Debbitt.

!Reflection might well be allowed to be more
long-winded, and Imagination itself to be more
fanciful than usual even with the Chronicler,
when — arrived at the end of the last of these
missives and the questions they contained, as

126 CHB0VICLB8 OF ▲ CLAY FABM.

yaried as the Postmarks they bore, — he threw
his eyes up at a many-coloured Geological Map
of the United Kingdom, hanging close beside
him, and pictured to himself the possibility, and
the value, of just such a Map, with its strong
colours under-shaded by the 'Agricultural cus-
toms ' that further sub-divide its geological out-
lines. The curiously contrasted interrogatories
supplied by the letters he had waded through —
for questions are mostly fertile in self-disclosure
— ^would almost have furnished rudely the out-
lines of such a Map. Perhaps, thought he, be-
fore the century is out, the dream of 1835 may
become an useful reality.

XVI.

LOW PEICES AND LONG FACES.

Days — weeks — ^montlis — how you drift away!
bearing the present time with all its clamorous
and busy sounds of life, into that long wake that
stretches far — ^farther than the eye can reach —
behind us ! How you float past — boiling and
tumultuous at first, as just escaped from the din
and turmoil that marks the everlasting conflict
of our onward course — ^then gently and deceit-
fully subsiding ofi* with only a rising ripple here
and there, that beckons to the eye and tells of
something that will be remembered — some duty
unperformed — some happiness perceived too late,
— ^then, at last, sinking away into the smooth
surface that stretches far behind in undistinguish-
able outHne, blending near things and remote
into one great Past, and leaving us to wonder at
the intensities of fear and hope, of vanity and

128 CHBONICLBS OF ▲ CLAY FABM.

tusefiilness, of evil and of good, with which each
moment as it passed seemed pregnant.

How toise we are, as we look back! How
clear-sightedly we discover each blunder, and its
cause ; how surely we believe that here at least
and there at least — ^forgive us this once, O Com-
mon sense and Judgment! — ^we wiU promise
never to be such fools again !

Did ever man build a house — or farm a farm
—or even drain a marshy meadow — and not feel
some touch of this provoking after-wisdom that
comes too late, teUing of material and money
wasted — plans insufficiently considered, too
hastily accredited — ^tiles mislaid, too shallow or
too deep, or in the wrong direction? In the
matter of brick-and-mortar such aflersight is
grown a jfroverb ; and is it otherwise in land ?
Let him who has never felt it, cast the first
stone : he has known little of Life's learning who
has never repeated to himself how true it is that
Experience is never given, but always bought;
^and at the top price of the market !

But there is this consoling difference between
Bricks, and Tiles, — that is to say, between
Building and Parming: that whereas in the
former case you always find your cost in having
done too much, proceeded on too large a scale —

LOW PBICES AJSJy LONG FACES. 129

in the latter case you mostly find, such at least
was my discovery — ^that your unprofitable ex-
pense is for ever peeping out in the niggling na-
ture of your plans — afield by field, hedge by hedge,
drain by drain, a tank here, a cowhouse there —
you have waddled through your Farm, denying
your better instructs, resisting the true economy
which would have prompted a complete and com-
prehensive plan that looks the whole matter in
the face at once : as though a man should build
a' mansion room by room, and paint and furnish
and roof them in, one by one, solemnly counting
the cost all the way, and shutting his eyes to the
conviction that the next room — ^and the next
story, must come at last, — and that one roof, one
plan, one outlay, the cheapest because the most
compendious, might have covered all, and saved
the worry and mortification of jobs undone, ar-
rangements altered and blunders deplored.

Architects are expensivie things it is true — ^but
stiU the comprehensive plan is the cheapest in
the end. We ' want JFarm-architects, Not
(Heaven help us !) that we want more expense
i^ £eurming, or in farm buildings, but a kind of
knowledge in the whole laying out of a farm,
analogous to that of the architect who plans a
building. The Landlord, the Tenant, the Brick-

130 CHB0NICLE8 OF A CLAY FABM.

layer, the Carpenter, the Workman, and last not
least the gaping Neighbour — each has his opi-
nion, and gives it freely enough. The result is
generally a mongrel compromise between them
aU. No one voice — ^no one plan is predominant,
and by the time the whole outlay is expended,
the job is half a job, and the ship is spoilt for a
ha'p'orth of tar and an ounce of oakum. The
extreme of cold, as well as the extreme of heat,
will leave a blister on the fingers.

Five months had winged away — and the glori-
ous spnng of that eighteen hundred and thirty
odd, afore dated with such edifying minuteness,
and now hanging up like a cobweb in some ne-
glected passage of this Chronicle — ^had fallen into
something more than summer — since the Wet-
landshire Mercury had typified to the world at
large that a certain farm was to be let, at a cer-
tain time. * Fourteen* applications by the first
post, duly forwarded by the prompt Finn of
Penn and Debbitt — (and how many more by the
next — and the next — ^what boots it to particu-
larize P) had been forwarded in vain. For a
blight had faUen — ^the strangest of blights ! — ^the
blight of Plenty, over the sons of the soil, and
before September had crisped the morning air,

LOW PBICB8 AND LOKa TACE8. 131

and the partridge^chick had found cool midday
covert under the young tnrmp-leaf, every county
journal had its broad page of * Sales of Fanning
stock* set in types in which he who ran might
read — something more than met the eye,

" Fallen upon bad times ! — all up with

farming, I doubt, Sir !" said a muffled voice, out
of a red-striped neck-warmer j joggingly : for the
utterer of the sentiments was on a rough nag,
not a * good un to look at,' but he went — ^as an
old clock does, by habit — ^with an ash stick
steadily goiug, for pendulum, on one side, and a
spur peeping under the left gaiter, and steadily
going too, on the other, for regulator.

" AJl up with farming, I doubt !"

And the speaker threw an eye sideways to one
who rode on his left, as he repeated the last
words, — an eye most expressive — ^for with the
good natured * crow's foot* that nestled close up
to it and seemed to tell of home-feelings and fire-
side memories, there was a momentary wrinkle,
a peep of something weU accustomed to conceal-
ment, that glanced out for an instant — telegraph-
ing (how rapidly!) a half century's experience
of the words * In the Sweat of thy Brow
SHALT thou eat Bbead !' Yet not complain-
ingly : too truthfully and heart-whole for that.

132 CHBONICLBS OF A OLAY FABIC.

No answer came. The aah stick went os
steadily : and the spur ; for the tail performed
the part of index — a true isU-iail, swishing and
signalizing to each application of the blunt rowel
upon the same spot, grown homy and resistfnl
under its influence. The mouth that had spoken
dropped into the neck-warmer again — and the
kind but care-full eye looked straight forward,
with its feUow, into the early morning fog that
lay upon the road and fields, and dripped upon
the hedges, where the gossamer had hung its
tiny tissue, waiting patiently for Sunrise. CUeky
click, click, click, went the aggravating off-side
hind-shoe, for half a mile nearly, before another
word was spoken.

" Any chance of its rising ctgain, d'ye think,
SirP"

Stm no answer. The question could not have
applied to the Sun, for his red merry countenance
was already beginning to peep, immensely large,

over hill, like some welcome-faced Mend,

half behind the door,' glowing with the know-
ledge how the heart of him, or her, who sits
within will rush to tear away the screen that
separates them. It could not be the Sun : for
he is half up now, and yet no answer from that
thoughtful-looking Quixote, who sits his mare as

LOW FBICB8 AND LOVO VACX8. 133

if he was riding in a dream, and had lost the
power of utterance. It was strange, too ; for he
had been no moody companion firom the time
farmer Greening's trottiog nag overtook him on
the road ; and if he had been, Mr. Greening
wasn't the man to have hailed him in the merry
way he did, and especially in such times : he
would have gone by with the respectM, and self-
respectM, morning salute of one who never in-
truded, nor retreated, on life's highway, in the
matter of companionship. But that questionr^
What was there in it that had stopped the way-
cheer of discourse, and set one of the parties
thinldng like an oracle P It was lucky that his
mare happened to make a false step ajs he turned
her from the footpath where she had been nurs-
ing her hoofs, for it made him wake up, and say,
** Tm not sure, Greening, that I can answer your
question, but I can tell you how I answered one
of the same sort a fortnight ago, to a man who
came to look at my vacant farm»"

"Oh! I heerd of it. Sir, I heerd of itl Thejl
wu telling of it the other night at Bogmoor : and
didn't tell it bad either: old Dobson said the
West-country gentleman stood up to his frdl
height (and he wasn't a short un dther), and says
he, * Pray, Sir, how many bushelsof Wheat will

134i CHB0NICLB8 OF ▲ CLAT FABH.

this fann grow to the acre P' pompous-like ; and
says yoti, drawing up queerly (and, beg pardon,
you ain't a very tall un), and looking calcylatbkg
and confidentiaL-lLke, * From fifteen bushels to
fifty/ says you, a talking to your fingers ; and we
all laughed, for we knew your look : and I know'd
how you*d say it, and what you meant, pretty
well. Yes, yes I Iheerd o' that. He didn't like
it, however. I think if you'd 'a' said thirty be'd
'a' had the farm."

"No!"

"NotP Well, I don't know. Bobson said he
seemed smartish like, and he didn't mislike the
look o' the stubbles, nor the rick-yard neither.
What did he say to your crop o' Swedes in the
twenty-acre piece, the Brickfield-dose I think
you call it P Didn't he think them big enough?"

" He didn't tell me : he couldn't, indeed : for
he only looked over the hedge at them, saying
that ' it wasn't a Turnip farm.' As he spoke to
himself rather than to me, I didn't gainsay him.
But as it takes me a long time to say anything
smart, I accepted that as a notice, and prepared
my answer for what I foresaw was coming when
we had done riding through the stubbles : and as
I think his hoofs were on every acre of them, I
had time enough for preparation."

LOW FBICES AND LONG FACBS. 135

A short silence ensued. The ash-stick and the
spur seemed to work less emphatically. The
horses dropped into a walk : they were nearing

the town of , which began to 'loom through

the morning mist. ' The approaching termination
of the ride seemed to bring the two saddles closer
together.

^* I think I know what you mean. I had an
inkling of it before, when I heard the story &om
old Dobson ; but I see it plainer-like now, after
what youVe said. Tou likes a man as thinks of
grace af&re meat" said Mr. Greening in a sort
of under tone, and looking up into the £b^ of the
other, significantly, and with an expression of
half inquiry.

" YouVe described it more shortly and better
than I could have done ; you Ve hit the naiL on

the very head," said the other. " I don't

know how it is, Qreening, but these dark misty
mornings bring some thoughts into my mind
that I hardly know how to tell exactly as I feel
them. But this I know, that some of the
thoughts they bring make me shrink from the
very sight of a man who looks at nothing but
the Wheat stubbles. I'd as soon ride this mare

straight into the knacker's yard"

"Lor'bleshye, Sir!"

136 CHS0NICLE8 OF A CLAY FABK.

" Well — ^you understand me ; it's but a young
one, certainly, for that last journey ; but I should
feel less sin or shame in that, than in letting a
farm to a man who looks at the stubbles first,
and the Turnip-fields afterwards, or not at alL
The knacker has an eye for horseflesh"

•— "For the dogs"—

" Exactly ! and so have some men for a farm.
It does seem to me strange that all these Corn-
law pamphlet-writers and law-makers should
have omitted this — ^but I forgot ^I am afraid
you and I are not quite on the same bench in
that question."

" Ah I don't 'e say so ! I should like, uzuxmi-
mon, to have a bit of a talk with you, though,
about that. It beats me entirely when I hear

tell that you ar*n*t ^that you go with them

there Free-Tra— "

'* Take care ! take care !" said the other, turn-
ing quickly in his saddle, as the fore-horse of a
wagon-team turned suddenly at tuJl trot down
hill from a side lane into the high-road, grazing
Mr. Greening's unspurred foot with the point of
the leader's stretcher, and bringing the whole
team, and the wagon after them rumbling round
the comer, a very near shave and at the immi-
nent risk of spilling a sack or two of Wheat

LOW PBICE8 AND LONG FACES. 137

that lay not very safely on the near-side shel'-
board.

"Ay ! there ye go," said Mr. Greening, rather
angrily, as his hot and rough^coated nag jmnped
with some alacrity against the pathway out of
reach of the wheels, pressing the other rider
pretty close to the ditch, as the wagon passed on
before them — " there you go Mr. Cropfield with
your new wheat and your Straw again ! I won-
der how many sacks to the acre youVe grown
upon last year's Oat-stubble this time ! Do look
at the boultings. Sir ! That's for litter for the
team I suppose ! He's late to market with that
load ; no wonder the' go so fast. Well, if it ain't
enough to make an honest head ache to see
that I" added the indignant farmer, in a tone of
unusual sarcasm. " That's what I call taking the
eggs to market, and the hen aUmg"

"Wheat on an Oat stubble! He brings

back manure, I suppose P"

"Ay, for the Barley-crop j or Oats again, may
be : it's all the same : he cownis bach^ao'ds; he
begins with the grain, and ends with— no, no,—
he never comes to the green. He says sterna
pay quicker than roots : and Stock's expensive ;
so he starts at once with the high figures —
though, my life! 'tis but a low 'un now, for

138 CHBONICLSS 07 A CLAT FABH.

that matter. Bo you think, Sir, it 'U ever get
up again P"

" The old question again ! I'm afiraid. Green-
ing, you'd never hear out fche answer, even if
I could give it. Sharp questioners are short
listeners."

" Oh ! trust me for that : if you'd spare me the
yal'e of a half-hour's walk through those Swedes
again (I should like te see how the dibh'd uns
get on), I think I can take all you'll give, and
ask for more."

" Oh, you're most welcome to see the Swedes :
you'll come round to the dibbing, depend on it,
and when we've done there — "

" I shall come round to something else ! Ah !
that's capital ! ^o, no, no I" said Mr. Greening,
laughing and suddenly bending his pony's shaggy
neck with a jerk of both reins towards the street
that led into the cattle fair, for they had reached
the town, and the turn brought the colloquy to
an end. " Well, I shall keep you to your pro-
mise. Sir, howsomever. Please to look out for a
trespasser on Monday morning I you'll be most
like to catch me early. I haven't forgot your
words last autumn about the matty — ^what was it
—the mattytynial hours."

" You'll be my fast prisoner to luncheon-tiine.

LOW FBICBS AJSTD LOSTCh FACB8. 139

Well, good day, Greening, and a good Fair !"

Ah. ! those * matutdnal hours !* I repeated to

myself, as Mr. Greening's good-natured face
nodded away, and the ash stick and the well-
worn spur, and the click, click, click, of the hind
hoof were lost up the street, towards which Nelly
swerved sympathetically for a pace or two before
she swung again into her usual trot, and forgot
her little rough-coated companion.

XVII.

A 'MATUTINAL HOUE/

It requires no small experience of life, to fully
realize the often heard and often repeated truth,
that 'everything goes by comparison.' When
the philosopher teUs us that we only know the
true value of a thing by the want of it, he merely
reasserts this fact. We judge only by the light
of contrast. A man who has lived all his life in
England has no adequate conception of the Eng-
Ush climate. Including with it that of Scotland
and Ireland, it stands alone in the world — ^in that
part of it at least which most travellers visit — ^the
Continental world. Its sudden smiles and sud-
den tears are something truly hysterical. Like
some fair maiden who weeps she knows not why
— then stops and smiles a bit — a fickle smile —
then falls to weeping again ; there is no knowing
when or where or how to be up to all her moods.

A 'MATUTINAL HOUE.* 141

She is the very April among nations. The Baro-
meter, a tolerably steady-going goide elsewhere,
she turns into a perfect laughing-stock. Four-
teen times out of fifteen, it is said, she makes
him play the fool. He is like an old Pointer —
always making a dead set at a dead scent, or—at
nothing: — ^a disap-pointer indicating that which
f0(t8, — and is no longer.

Is it a vice or a virtue ? It does not come for
nothing. It has its meaning. It is not sent
* promiscuous-like' to worry and perplex " us
fools of Nature,** for no object or intent. In her
trickiest and wildest and most fantastic frolics,
I^ature is full of soul, full of deepest, and aye !
of most loving ptbrpose, manward. Under hotter
skies, where the fiesh of beasts is not so much a
food as an unhealthy stimulant to the blood, and
where the cool vegetable and farinaceous diet are
all that man*s strength or warmth or appetite
requires, 'cats and dogs* indeed do sometimes
come rattling down for days together; but
they come in a pack, fuU cry : or in equaUy ex-
pressive Indian phrase, it pours * monkeys with
their mouths open* when it pours at aU. But the
gentle English sky alone ' rains Turnips* : and
English Legs o* mutton, and English Eoast-beef,
were assuredly concealed behind the veil of cen-

142 CHBOKICLSS OF A CLAY FABM.

tunes, wlien the first daring mariner, as old He*
rodotas tells us, was scared back by the * Fog
eixA falling feathers* from the sacred coast of
Albion. Far away in the thirsty regions of the
South, as sun rolled after sun, in dry and blazing
sameness through the sky, unscreened by the
mercy of a single cloud, I have gasped and pined
for an English wetting — ^for one day in the most
dripping covert — ^for the murkiest downpour —
for the darkest clouds that ever gathered in
gloomy council over a November day, — ^tiU the
very memory of it seemed like a dream too de-
lightful to have been ever true ! And often since,
when the very drainers — (and they stand the
waters from above the firmament, and under it,
pretty well) — ^have cast up furtive eyes out of
their soaking* trenches to see if ' the Master
budged,* giving sundry hints that *it*s a'most
time to give in^ IVe stood my ground for hours
against the welcome fog and shower and dark-
ness, from the sheer inward force of well-remem-
bered contrast, determined to have it out with
Nature, and come to a final arrangement — a sort
of water-level with her, for having been cheated
out of two or three English winters. And I
sometimes thiok she has whispered me a secret,
in return, about those dark and mis-abused No-

A 'MATUTINAL HOUR.* 143

vember days — as she is prone to do to those who
persevere with her — ^which have made me prize
her, and them, and the land they love and lave,
the better ; and feel that there is a rough poetry
and truth in its iron-grey mistfr and showers,
which have made true of the Farmer what was
said of the good and brave man under life's
trials: —

" He does not run all helter-skelter
To seek a temporary shelter ;
Nor does he fume and fret and foam
Because he's distant far from home ;
For well he knows, each trouble past,
He's sure to jGjid a Hohe — at last I"

It was to some such inward thought I was in-
debted, — and as a faithful chronicler I ought to
teU it, — for the courage with which, after tossing
off the blankets an hour earlier than usual, I
threw my window open to — such a Monday
morning ! pre-falsified by the brightest stars and
clearest sky that ever closed the day of Christian
Rest.

One universal soaking drizzle seemed to have
taken secure possession of earth, sky, and the
day. The small rain gathering on the trees
dripped larger from leaf to leaf, falling in the
most hopeless and measured way, taking it easy
as though for a week's continuance, and no hurry

144 CHBONICLES OF A CLAT FABM.

at all about the matter. A single red streak,
much too red, lay along one part of the horizon,
like a long-drawn smile, pregnant with malicious
warning for the afternoon, aad killing the faint
hope that clings to ' twelve o'clock ' as an alter-
ative.

Now for my promised trespasser among the
Swedes ! No need for man-traps to-day in thai
quarter, thought I, preparing to meet the foe,
with a pair of gaiters that seemed made for the
Slough of Despond. The turf-ground toeezed
and yielded under every footstep, plainly dating
back the rain to an early hour of the night, aa I
made my way to the field ; and as my eye scan-
ned its whole space over, the victory of the 'early-
bird* seemed assured — ^when suddenly close to
me, from the other side of the hedge, just where
the master-drain opened out,^— came a ringing
"Good-morning, Sir!'* iuto my very ear, and
Mr. Greening, rising from the bent postture in
which he had been scrutinizing the drain, looked
with mischievous unconcern the victory he bad
promised, and accomplished.

" Not deep enough ! " quoth he ; laconically.

"Which!"

"Oh — ^the Drain — not you; and as for me, I
was deep enough ! You thought the drop o' rain

A 'MATUTINAL HOITE.* 145

Kad stopped me : no, no ! I like a rainy day, to
see this sort o' land. These are laid at three
foot! Four's better."

" You really think so P "

" I*m sure of it ! But I thought you was all
for the deep drain? I heard so, long afore I
tried it."

"And that's why these were laid at three.
This lower part, up to yonder oak-tree, is the
first field I drained : and if you had seen the
work I had, to get down three feet "

** Oh ! ay, ay ! I remember now you mention
it. Well, I like the four-foot. But not too wide,
mind ! I*Il allow any man to tell me how deep
to drain, if he'll leave me, on my own sile, to say
the width. It's a pity to spare a row or two o^
tiles, to run a risk."

" Well : this is three feet, by twenty-one in
width : down the old furrows, in fact. And the
worst of it is, it drains extremely well. "

« * The best,' you mean P "

" The worst ! — The good done by the shallow
drain has been, in practice, the longest enemy of
the deep one. A man who finds his field im-
proved by the shallow drain, holds that as a fact.
When you tell him that double the depth would
have more than doubled the improvement, he

L

146 CHEOJTICIiXS OF A CLAT TASH.

treats that as a a theorp, A dubadfui. thing,

that Theoiy ! I wonder how many who use the
word — ab-use it rather — ^know the meaning of it.
But what say you to the dibbingP"

" Well, tiiey're very reglar : hardly one nuss'd
But I don't like to see 'em quite so high oat of
the ground. I fancy it makes a tough skin, and
a bitter one. The drilled uns don't look so re-
glar, but they seem to hold the ground better.
How's it done P "

" By the acre ; after the first ridging-op, nn-
Boanured; a boy goes first, pressing the dlbin
with his foot. You shall see it presently ; it is
held by both hands at the top, with a spoke out
for the foot, just above the ball of the dibber, to
mark the next distance as its point meets the
ground, in drawing it out, sideways, in going
along. The hole takes about a half-pint, — more
it should be. The women follow with the ma-
nure in a sort of hopper, toss a can-ML in, which
fills the hole, and drop the seed in. It is done
very quickly ; but the mixing of the maiuire is
the great point. You must come and see it
done."

" I should like it better for light soils. I doubt
its answering so well on this kind," sdid Mr.
Greening, thotightfuUy, and poking his stout

i. 'mxtutinal houb.' 147

stick under a turnip wluch rose very slowly and
reluctantly out of its bed. " Wliat is to he done.
Sir, with these Clay Siles !— I like *^eni — ^I own I
like the strong site best — but what^s tke use o'
liking what don't pai^? The labour's double :
everything's double expense on ^em, and the time
less to do it in : for drain ^em how you will, you
eftn Thot make winter work on *em, as you can
u^n the light. JN^ow don't you confess that P "

^ Ah : thereby hangs a long tale \ C9iemisi^
on the Light soils — Mechanics on the Clays J
When will that great * Chapter the Second' begin
to open? We haven't quite found out every-
thing yet, Greemng \ There's something to eome,
I suspect, upon the Clays, that will startle you
and me — ^wise as we are — aqme day. " A thing
to dream of— not to tell." But come — ^youmust
put the Beansy meanwhile, agaiast tiie BarUy"

" Well, that's true : but that won't match it,
I'mafeared; not by a great deal. Here's Wheat
now down at five-and-thirty ! Egad, I can't ^ive
it away ! and I remember my poor old father, —
and that's five-and-twenty year ago, in the war-
time, — as the bushel o' Wheat dropped into^h^
sack, saying to me, ' There s a guinea, Ben \ ' aai4
' There's another ! ' as the next fell in ; and sp i^
went on. That was farming, that wsm ! I 'ii^

148 CHBONICLES OF A CLAY FABM.

blest if I don't think they got their own price,
and owrs along !**

** You've hit the very truth, I do believe : they
forgot to take their share of the per contra, when
the war was over. They made a will, bequeath-
ing that to us ; for that, I imagine, will be the
end of it."

"What's the use of making a Will, when you've
nothing to leave P They should have left us an-
other war, and short harvests ; that 'ould have done
better than any laws, I fancy, to keep up prices."

"Postponed the change, perhaps; not pre-
vented it: it was inevitable some day. The
fairer course would have been to have accepted
it when it feU due, and begun a&esh, with some
of those guineas in hand that you speak of."

"Well : it has been but a crumbling wall for
twenty years, ever since the War ended, with
now and then a bit of a check, in spite of all the
laws to prevent it : and these three fair harvests
have laid us now as flat as we could lie, if the
worst had come to the worst."

"It seems then that to inherit a falling market
is worse than to be bom into a low one. You're
but right. The latter admits of hope ; the other
is continued mis-calculation, and disappoint-
mrait : — and something worse than either."

A 'MATUTINAL HOUE.* 149

"And what's that P"

"I won't tell you till after breakfast ! Come,
you old Grumbler, it's the driest subject in Crea-
tion, and will take you three cups of hot coffee
to get it down. You shan't come into my Sanc-
tum with those boots — boots ! why, they're like
barges, sunk to water's-edge ! You remind me
of a certain Mr. Demos of Athens, a very noted
gentleman in days by-gone —

"Twas ask'd through all the quarter,

'* Came you in Boots, sir, or in Boats —
By Land, sir, or by Water?''**

off with *em ! they shall be cooked, under the
mutton chops, and come in again with the muf-
fins 1 You're in close custody ; so peel off that
patrimonial-looking great-coat, and send it after
the boots. Why — it's as heavy as — those same
guineas ! I'll be bound the lining's stuffed with
'em ! " [Mr. Gr. eyed it over, and shook his
head, smiling grotesquely.] "Well ! come along
— you shall abuse the * Furriners ' and Free-
traders over the first two cups, and we'll
drink * Better prices for '36 !* over the third. "

* See the 'Knights' of Aristophanes, 321. The
above is Mitchell' a^ exquisite translation of the pun.

xvin.

*TALPA' LOQUITUE.

Among the various experiences which the much
more social Agriculture of the last twenty years
has brought, (for a great change has come over
us in that particular since — well — never mind
how long ago I was going to say, — ) there is none
^hich has struck me more than that part of its
philosophy which consists in the operation of
mind upon mind. That of *mind upon matter*
is not a very new subject : we see it every day, —
and hear of it too, till it is something tiresome :
just now we are on a different theme, and a less
•trodden : 'mind upon mind* is our point at pre-
8)ent, and perhaps the more important of the
two, after all. I was going to say that in a pretty
long and intimate experience of a rather curious
soil to deal with, and to which never did zaan,
horse, or implement, deny the epithet 'stiff,' — I

'talpa' loquitttb. 151

too, like them, hare had my own dumb reflec-
tionfi, and not the leaat emphatic of these have
grown out of the everyday phenomena of mind
acting upon mind. You tell a man something
today, or express an opinion, or assert a fact,
about a thing which he has perhaps nerer no-
ticed, or never heard, before ; he smiles, starts,
shakes his head, or delivers himself in some other
way, for the' ways are various in which men * be-
have' (as the chemists call it) under the infiltra-
tion of a new idea. Whatever the mode may be,
€»ie thing you may be sure of, that in the grunt,
the smile, the laugh perhaps, in fact whatever it
Biay be that meets you, the attitude of mind
bet(^ened is that of— dissent, I am far from
complaining of it : some of my best hands have
given me infinitely the most mental gravelling in
this respect But what I do complain of, and
want to know where to apply for remedy, (since
the Law tells us that for every Wrong there lies
one) — ^is that these same hard-headed fellows,
workmen, neighbours, friends, kind advisers, or
whatever other relation they may hold, — six,
twelve, or eighteen months afterwards, coolly
come to me, and with all that air of profound
thought that becomes a man of refiective cha-
racter, down-calving as one may say with some-

162 CHBONICLES OF A CLAY FASM.

thing intensely wise, announce to me in laaguage
of their own, the very thing which I at sncli time
back suffered a small martyrdom in the yain en-
deavour to urge upon them,

I know not whether other * employers of la-
bour * have felt this sort of paulo post fittwrum
experience as I have done. But I suspect so ;
for every man is (and it is comforting to think so)
only the unit of a elms. It is difficult to study
for years the character of a soil, without learning
something of the character of those employed
upon, aye and even of those who visits it. And
this has been my especial grievance, and one
which Time, the ' smooth-handed god, ' has in-
creased, not lightened. People who derided my
'improvements,* laughed at my 'deep* drains,
bewept my grubbed-up ash-stumps, mourned
over my obliterated hedgerows, turned up noses
at my tank, listened with mock-gravity to my
'mysterious* remarks about the 'economy of
warmth * as cheaper than the * equivalent in food,*
— and a great many other things that it would
take an inventory to tell, — do now come and
preach to me such admirable sermons on my
own poor old antiquated texts, that I should
really begin, as other worthies have done before
me, to doubt my own identity, — ^but for a httle

*TAI.PA* LOQUITUE. 163

store laid by in a comer, of the capital I began
with, and which I commend again to all hegirmers
— ^namely, of philosophy.

'* The mind," says an old author, " like the
body, must digest before it can 'assimilate.'
The hungry dog bites your fingers as he takes
your morsel: but the food becomes flesh, and
the want is forgotten, — ^with the giver."

And so I have found it: and so, no doubt,
have others. No sooner is a new thought im-
parted, than it sets up for itself, and denies its
pedigree. " Why, that is exactly what I told

you three years ago, when you came — ^&c. 1 "

you feel on the point of rapping out, struck with
amazement.

Spare your breath ! and your reproach. He
cannot remember anything but what he 7U)w
knows. He forgets that he ever thought other-
wise! TeU him, tiow, something new, and you
wiU see again the same derisive smile, the same
look of idle wonder, aye of contempt, at your
fanciful, ideal, * theoretic ' notions : and twice
twelvemonths hence, when your idea has taken
root and become a fact, the scene of to-day will
be acted over again. Then go to your Library,
— ^large or small, — ^and look back over the history
of the world ; and you will see that the annals of

154 GHBONlCIiBa OF A CLAY FABM.

human mrentioii and discorefy are the trae bia*
tory of Martyrdom, and that to be stoned by his
own generation, and worshiped by the next, is
at once the penalty of human pioneership, and
the reiterated monmnentof hmnan foUy, dottdng
the road, like milestones. '

It is very fine, no doubt, to connect one's own
small-scale improvements, after this feshion, with
the history of the Great and Dead, to whom life
was one conflict with ridicule and contempt — a
history the most affectingly interesting — ^perhaps
the most important that is left to us ; — ^but after
an, the grandeur or pettiness of the scale does
not alter the argument. And when I had listened
for half an hour to Mr. Greening discoursing
of Guano and Superphosphate, in as easy and as
matter-of-fact a style as if he had regularly carted
them out of his farm-yard on to the turnips any
time this fifty years, (though he still called it
Gu-anner and would not have it at any price as a
word of two syllables,) I could not help mentally
amusing myself with thinking of the time when
he used to poke every imaginable jocularity at
me for * sowing the sawdnst, * wheel-barrow fann-
ing,* * pocket-dungcarts,* — and a whole heap of
good sayings which, duly noted down on my part,
made my chronicle of that date a complete glos-

sary of farm-wittieismB i and cmious it was to
see how the memory of former inoredulities liad
passed away^ow* him. My deepest drains were
no longer deep ; my largest fields no longer * to'
Ing for the farm.' But Greening was a true im«
prover notwithstanding. He baptized every
new-born notion with a jest, but he watched its
growth and adopted each youngster iii suocession,
and so heartily and practically withal, that they
seldom got iato his hands without thriying better
after aU than they had done in mine.

Ye ardent Gro-aheads 1 who expect every new
argument to tell at once, — every intellect to yield
at the first onset, every new plan to be tried by
everybody, — ^leamto wait: and yon will find that
there is mnch more chance of yonr notion being
OYertaken than overlooked, much more likelihood
of your having to te^-claim than to re-cusert &
single hint that was ever good for anything. The
seed may seem a long time bnried, but if it have
any vitality in it, it is germinating where you
little think, and will fructify when you least ex-
pect, and with a produce you had never dreamt
of. And when you come again and say ' Ihis is
nUne F do not be surprised if shouts of louder
laughter greet you than even befell your first
announcement of it.

166 CHBONICLSa OF A CLAY FAIKM:.

I had time to think all this : for my gnest, hke
a shiewd bargainer, as he was, gave a little fling
to the general discourse before he came to busi-
ness. In fact he had the true diplomatic tact of
always making the business come of itself
" Well then 1 Here's * Better Prices for * thirty-
six ' ! and that's with all my heart, and no mis-
take,'* said he, 'topping up,' with a final cup of
Coffee, that healthiest and purest of mortal meals,
a plain but hearty breakfast. " And now. Sir,
— ^when are we to see 'em!" he added, giving
his chair a shove sideways, slapping his hands on
his knees, and facing me, like a lion refreshed :
" for it's my notion we never shall again ! "

"And then P"

" Why the farmers '11 be ruined, and the land
'U go out of cultivation."

" And the Landlords P "

" Will follow, of course. They depend upon
the Farmers, and the farmers on the land."

"And the land on the price of Wheat P "

" Surely."

" Tell me this, Greening, have rents risen or
£&llen since the War P"

" Eisen, certainly ; and too much, to my think-
ing."

"And the price of Wheat has been fsLlling:

*TALPA* LOQUITUR. 157

from eighty or ninety shillings a quarter to forty
or fifby, as we remarked this morning. £ents
rising, and prices falling !"

" Aye ! and the farmer's business getting wnss
every year. *Tisn*t like what it used to be."

" Just so ! and competition keeping up the
rents notwithstanding I"

''Aye! that Competition! It didn't use to
be so. And what is it after all P No sooner a
Farm's vacant than a hundred fellows come yelp-
ing affcer it like a pack-o'-hounds, offering a high
rent, and not one of 'em perhaps with the valye
of a team o' horses of his own, scarce : and when
they get in, what do they do ? Crop every field
that '11 bear a crop, sell all off for a few years,
and then leave it dean beggared, and the land-
lord without his last year's rent p'rhaps."

" No Turnips — they take no root, Greening ! "
" Turnips ! they've no stock to give 'em to !
"What's the use o' them growing Turnips P that's
not their sort o* business."

" And they outbid the honest cultivator, and
the skilful one : in fact they caii afford to do so,
because they can afford to rob : just as though a
man offered you a higher rent for your house,
meaning to sell off the AimitureP"

** That's just it : that's just whi^t it is, surefy.'*

158 CHBONICLBS OF ▲ CLAT FARM.

^ And tlie higher the price Wlieat is kept at,
tiie better it pays, — ^the greater the pr^niiuii, in
fact, on that kind of ' farming,* — the higher the
shasn-r^its offered oyerthe head of the fisdr tenant,
— ^the smalls the inducement to steady and fair
eultivation, — ^the greater the .breadth of Wheat
unfairly grown, — the greater the consequent
ghit upon the com-nmrket, and the injury done
to the honest grower who has earned one large
grain crop by growing roots and feeding plraity
of stock, instead of raking the land by Sequent
and diminishing crops with no stock at all. Is
that to your liking P Will you pray that the in-
ducement may continue of that style of farming?
of that style of competition ? of that style of rent-
raising, that ends in ruin to the beggared land,
the ignorant landlord, the foolish tenant, and the
defrauded labourer?"

Mr. Greening looked thoughtful, — "Well—
there's something in that, perhaps ; but how's it
to be stopped? How's them sort o* farmers to
be put an end to P"

Now it was the other's turn to be a lion. So
l^e savage beast sat bolt opposite to poor Green-
ing, and glaring fiercely in his face growled out
— " Now look at me like a man — don*t faint—
and I'll tell you.— By serving them as you do

•talpa* LOQiTiTTra. 159

the Bats when yoa take the IMcks away ! Starv-
ing 'em out ! There's no other way ! They'll
starve you if you don't starve them. Their food
— ^th^ ofdy food js-r-ever has been — ihe pre-
mium price — ^the disproportionate value of the
grain-crop. Take away that Bauble !" qiioth
DMrmer Oliver — ^the Protector.

There was an * awful psuofie.' Mr. G^e^ng
was looking into the fire. One would think
tiiere was something written in the live emfoexB
which he was trying to deeypher — so hard he
looked at it. — "Ah! I've thought o' that!" hd
slowly muttered at last, as if to himself: — " Kill
or cure! But that's *kill first and otwe after-
wards.'"

" Kill tiie proud flesh, to cure the sound. Yes :
eruel work, no doubt, at any time ; but crueller
when done at the wrong one."

"When'sthat?"

" The moment when it will be done ; as surely
as effect follows cause ! Does it ueed a ghost to
tell us that that time wiU be a timiO of searciiy-^
a famine perhaps, or a fancied one P jThen it
win be done, and done in a hirry too I And

then ^What c<Hnes after a famine, Greening ?

"What is the recoil of Scarcity ? — Ahwndance —
very true \—then will be the tug of war, then !

160 CHBOKIGLBS OF A CLAY FABM.

for good and bad together. ' A crael brute, this
Lion,' we shall say ! and yet he pastures on the
cruellest of all : he cracks the bones of the true
blood-suckers ; and ' when it*s bad weather for
thieves/ they say, ' the true man may sleep the
sounder,' let the rain rattle on kis corn-stack
how it may. ' Let Mr. Lion roar again/ you
will say, when you've seen the end. Even your
tiny Mole is a ruthless beast of the field — to
slugs, and snails, and caterpillars, and such land-
sucking firy — ^a fierce subnavigator, in his way :
but his track turns up some pretty cultivation ;
it only wants spreading , — far and wide ! it's not
so wise to throttle him as you think. I grieve
to see him hanging gibbeted — ^his clever paddles
stopt, by cruel ignorance. For he is your only
granulation-master ; he taught us drainage — and
«u5-cultivation — and we shall learn of him an-
other, and a greater lesson, some day, and call
him a prophet — ^when we've done hanging him^
and have got some speculation in our own eyes
(whose sense is shut at present), instead of say-
ing he can't see. Day and Night ! He has the
better right to say so of us ! — ^But as for this
price-of-com question — this grain crop twrsus
Ghreen crop — ^trust me, Nature has her true Pro-
portityns — and is pretty rigorous in maintaining

*TALPA* LOQUITUE. 161

i;liem : and you cannot throw them out of gear,
l>ut she'll be down upon you, somewhere. Oreen-
crop versus Chain-crop / Which would you
show favour to, if either P the man who comes to
^nake an investment — ^to earn a crop, knowing
the cost, or the spoiler that comes to talke one,
counting nothing ? — him that comes to sow be-
fore he reaps, or him that comes to reap before
lie sows ? Do you remember what I said about
* Grace before meat.* "

" Yes, yes ! I remember it, IVe thought of it
too, though I never did in that way *xactly be-
fore. — ^I see your meaning, now. But — ^but —
about the — ^What was it you said about the
Bents?"

" Ah ! the core ! the vital point — ^is n*t it ?
touch it tenderly for the life of you I"

*' But will they fall?"

" Will* they stop rising a bit P Catch that fish
first. Get him weU on the hook : land him care-
fully ; and you won*t have quite an empty basket,
I can teU you. I'm not sure if it won't take care
of itself afterwards. Which farm pays the best
rent, even now, the one where the highest was
promised— or the other 1"

Mr. Greening drew in his lips and shook his
head. " Let the Landlords answer that. * 'Taint
all gold that glitters.' " m

lot CHBONICLBB OV ▲ CLAT FABK.

" True: so for those thai caa't distingpiiijdi, a
pfore cmreiicy were the greater blessing, eh P"

'' There'll be less of it, Tm thinkiiig/' said
ICr. Greeiiixig, " if it comes to that. Sat that
aint alL There's th«n dc^ SiLes. We havoi't
done with them yet."

" We haven't begun with *em. \ We know no-
tiiing about them! almost absolutely nothing!
We know that they axe stiff to the plough and
sticky to the flock ; positive to 1^ Bean, and
negative to Barley r costly to dndn, and, without
it, profitless to &rm. We Hnnder on, witih just
these two or l^ee negative dogmas on our
tongues, and are satisfied to thii^ ^kwtn. know-
ledge enough. The truth is, we have everything
to learn about them. I say again we haven't be-
gun with 'em ! But come, I'm o«Lt of breath.
* After breakfast sit awhile,' — ^we mnst n't ride
the old maxim to death. Let's go and iook at
them: I can give 'you your choice — ^Bed, blue,
yellow, and white, and every one with a dififeiDent
temper for every month of the year ! The man
that can tell what ^ to be done with them — "

"He's the ^coming man,' I suppose," said
Mr. Greening, laughing, and beginning to pull
on his great coat ; " he must be able to mix Mre
and Water first, I'm l^unking !"

*tai.pa' loquitue. 163

" And make Steam P**— said the other.

Mr. Greening turned short round at the an-
B^wer, as he was going to the door, and looked a
xdoment fixedly at the speaker. Both smiled :
1:>iit there was a difference in the smiles. And
tliey walked out together.

XIX.

THE * POWERS * THAT BE.

The concluding words of the conversation which
had taken place between my worthy guest and
myself over the breakfast table, gave us both an
inclination to go and look at the ploughing. A
Wheat stubble which had just been drained was
being broken up for the next year's Turnip fallow.
It was a stiff and rather thin soil, which had, to
my long remembrance, been year after year suf-
fering a continual loss, of that kind denoted by a
deposit of fine sand at the bottom of each furrow,
against the lower headland, from the silting away
of the lighter particles of soil with the surface
water that ran down them. I used never to look
at it without asking myself * How many hundred
years has this been going on P and what must be
the amount of deterioration of texture (to say
nothing of loss of manure), which this field has

THE 'powers' that BE. 165

suffered in the aggregate P Qnery — ^would it be
as stiff a soil as it has now the reputation of, if it
had not been always parting with its sand by
this continual process of superficial scraping?^
When I came to drain it, I found that my suspi*
cion was correct. Every here and there the sub-
soil was chequered by little * pots * of pure sand,
embedded in red clay, and so full of water that
the drainer was obliged to tap them careftilly to
preTent large masses breaking off and rushing
down with the fluid that burst out of them when
the sides were cut through. The eJBfect of the
drainage was already most remarkable. The
workmen called it 'beautifiil;* and though no-
thing can present a more dreary look than a
fresh drained field with all the cold varieties of
subsoil lying exposed along the lines of the drains^
I could not help feeling the truth of the expres-
sion applied as it was prospectively rather than
to the actual scene before the eye. It was * beau-
tiful * in the same sense that many a rough-?oo*-
ing act, and many a painful subduing thoughl^
and many a rainy day of life's adversities, is
* beautiful * — ^by its consequences ; and I always
liked the word, so pregnant with faith in what is
imseen except by the mental eye that * views the
Future in the Instant.* Inexperience or igno-

166 CHBONICLE8 OF A CLAY FJlSM.

T90a.ee woulct iiave called it int^iselj ugly* and
would ha¥e preferred the pireTioixs smooth surfiiee
of the field, dank, cold, and intractable as it was.
What a pleasant effect upon the hroad field of
society it wovild hare, if a few furrow-tiles oonld
imdermine some of the odLd stiff surfaces one
meets with here and there, through which no-
thing penetrates — ^in which no gentle piazit takes
root — ^while the lighter and better partidLes Na-
ture originally gave, keep silting away, as lile
advances, leaving nothing but a hard and chilly
surface growing colder and more impassive every
dsy to all the genial influences that shower
warmth upon the heart which wiU but esqpand
to and accept them.

"Well! you are a-going deep to be sure!'*—
said Mr. Greening, following the freah-tnmed
:fiuTow, and picking up an antediluvian lump of
subscMl now and then, and crushing it between
his fingers. " Why there's plenty of sand here :
this '11 be mild enough for anything presently ;
you don't call this a stiff soil P "

" It has lain like a stubborn brute ihat would
n't rise, for work or play, ever since I have known
it. It w<Mi't know itself next year ! It has never
home Turnip or Barley, since the Flood — which,
in £act, it has never recovered, I suppose, till the

THE 'TOWEBS* THAT BE. 16?

draimng-toi^ have bled it in this way. Haw
little one can say what a soil is, till it is drained I **

'* It does one's heart good to look at it now,
kawever," replied Mr. Greening; "doesn't it
make you kappy-Uke to see this sort of change,
and feel that you have done it P it does me."

" So happy, thai at the end of a winter's day
of draining- work I have spent hours of delicious
idle reverie, with the Lamp wasting beside me
as I sat alone, dreaming the day's work ov^r
again ; seeing, with closed eyes, the long pent-
up poison oozing away down its narrow channels,
— poison no longer ! and thinking of the future
showers that will percolate and filter through
the loosened soil and subsoil three or four feet
deep, like some &eed and gladdened thing, doing
its generous Maker's bidding. I hardly know
how to describe the sense of high priyilege the
thought brings with it— -of being allowed humbly
to aid, as it were, in Nature's glorious develop-
ment. I know of no pleasure that surpasses it —
or should surpass it — except one — except o»^—
except ONE ! "

" Goodness help us ! why that's three ! — ^And
what may it be, after all, that lifts the knocker
so many times for one visitor P "

" Look here. Greening ! do you see that poor

168 CHRONICLES OF A CLAY FABM.

fellow crackiiig his whip over the horses in that
lounging deyil-may-care fashion? It's his first
year at plough : he was * kipping craows ' for the
last two or three. Isn't that a proper amuse-
ment for a thing with a human skull, and a real
live human brain inside it P That's a promoted
scare-crow ! Doesn't he look happy P "

" Well ! he 's a right to do. He 's doing his
duty, isn't he, as well as you and me ! You can't
do without him."

" Ah ! yes, — ^yes ! that 's the answer. He 's a
machine , driving a machine."

" Well — ^no — ^not exactly that, neither. They
tell me a plough aint a machine. Come, I hare
you there for once, however. A plough 's only
a tool."

"True, true: a tool worked by horses, and
dragging a man after it. You never spoke
plainer truth. Greening! And here we are
somewhere near the middle of the nineteenth
century, and talk of agricultural improvemeTUs !
It shames me to think of it."

" What, ashamed o' the plough ! O dear, dear !
Well, I aint, and never was, nor never shall be
neither, that 's more/*

" Too much, a little. How do you know

you never will be?"

THE 'POWEBS' THAT BE. 169

" INot, however, till something Oh, ho ! I

know now what you *re after. You We a-drivihg
now J Ay, ay ! Now I think of it — ^they tell me
you're always a-driving somehow against the
plough. Well, what *s the matter with it P So
long as it*s a good nn, mind! Come now, I
should like to hear from your own lips what
you Ve got to say agin' it. I can not imderstand
them books, so it 's no use trying ; and I do try,
that 's a fact ; but as sure as I get half-way down
a page I go to sleep. A lot o' Chemistry and
stuff! 1*11 back Common Sense agin* Chemistry
any day. But I should like just to hear you on
a bit about the plough — I think I could under-
stand that r but you must please keep the words
clo8e-cropp*d you know, — no raspers! A far-
mer's words should be like his hedges, I always
think, — ^plain and short and smooth-like, and not
too many of 'em ! and then they may help to * fill
the bushel' after all, p'rhaps. But about the
plough — ^beg pardon — ^you was a saying some-
thing " '

"No, no! go on, Grreening! I like to hear ^oi«."
"WeD, I've done, i' faith! clean out, like.
I'm your listener for half an hour — ^more, if you
can spare it."

** Can you promise that P I've had many a

170 CHBOKICIiSS 07 A CLaiY PISIC.

UBeM hint ^om you — GoiM joa sit and listen
to my nonsense now, just for haJf an Lour, straight
on end — ^no snoring allowed, mind! — ^and whai
if I were to read it, instead of speaking P l^ow
don't be frightened ! it isn't a book— only a few
sheets of paper poked away in a drawer some-
where, and scribbled over : fancy it ti long letter
from your ever affectionate brother beyond ihe
sea, or a notice from your landl(»rd that he 's
going to lower your rent, and giTiDg all his rea-
souB for it. Don't you think you could keep your
^es openP

"Well, I think I could. But I hope it 's in
' words o' two syllables : ' 4^t 's all I bargain for ;
and I'm your man, now. "No time like present
time!"

A few ahort steps homewards; a long rom-
maging over a drawer of papers ; a great deal
of settling down comfortably in arm-chairs ; and,
I'm afraid, a couple of cigars, f<^owed tibis sud-
den resolution ; and Mr. Greening looked wide
awake, as the other casting his eye rapidly down
tiie ps^es of a manuscript, which looked as if a
swarm of spiders had crept out of the ink-pot
and been playing at leap-frog over the paper, —
cleared his throat and began reading his

THE 'powers' that BE. 171

* Peivatb NoTioNfi ON Cultivatioh/
' There are three kinds of 'power' employed
by man. The first is manual power, the second
is animal power, and the third and most recent,
is fnechaiMcal power. 'Eachi has its own peculiar
mo€le of action; and refuses to adopt that of
either of the others. The power of a man, from
his erect figure, and the direction of his spine,
acts most effectively in l^vmg^ When he works
at a winch, his greatest f(»rce is in lifting the
handle from its lowest point la the circle, to about
half way up. For the same reason, in pulling at
the oar, or towing a barge, he inclines his figure
as nmeh as possible in a direction p^^endicular
to the stress. In digging, he lifts the soil more
than the plough does, and in pressing the i^ade
into the groond he stiH employs perpendicular
force, limited only by his weight. Manual la*
bour is ia fact most powerfVd in perpendic^Uar
action.

'But when the man gives up the spade, the
hoe, or the flail, and employs his horse to culti-
vate or thresh for him, a new direction of ap-
plied power takes place. The bsick-bone of th^
quadruped is horizontal, not pei^endicular, to
the ground : and the adaptation of the power
must be accordingly. The horse cannot l^ and

172 CHBOKICLES OP A CLAY PABM.

jpress the implement of cultivation, but lie can
d/raw it along ; so the spade and the hoe are
turned into tools of d/raugkt, and are drawn
through the soil, raising it with the spiral- wedge-
like action of the plough,, very damaging to the
subsoil upon which the whole stress and harden-
ing pressure come, but cheap and expeditious
compared with the spade, so far as regards the
mere inversion, or partial inversion, of the soil ;
though doing little towards its cultivation. Again,
in threshing, the application of the horse's power
must still be horizontal, like his figure, and his
work be done by lateral pulling. The direction
of animal power, in fact, is horizontal : and ho-
rizontal draught is the only form in which it can
be applied *.

* But draught is not necessary/ to cultivation,
nor is it even desirable. The plough, the har-
rows, the scuffler, and the horse-hoe, are but pro-
cesses rendered necessary by the only possible
mode of applying horse-power to the turning and
breaking of the soil.

'Mechanical power is totally different: and
has no more business to be applied to the plough,

* Except in the case of a turnspit dog, or a squirrel
in a cage, where it is applied to generate circular
motion.

THE 'powers' that bb. 173

thaa a horse to a spade. When horses have been
taught to dig, the steam-engine may perhaps be
taught to plough : but nothing will be gained by
either; because it is kot thbib mode of ac-
tion, respectively. The laws of Matter and of
Motion are imperative ; and pay no service to
the dull-eyed prejudice of man. Mechanical
power has many modes of action ; but whether
wind, or water, or steam, be the driving agent,
the favourite motion is the verticalfy-circular,
or 'rotatory,* The horizontal water-wheel is
good, but extravagant, and of limited applica-
tion; but it is worth mention as an exception.
Where steam is employed, rotary action is al-
most universal. Instance the steam-paddle, the
screw-propeller, the common fly-wheel, the loco-
motive driving-wheel, the circular saw, the drum
of the threshing-machine, the steam pump, and
many others that will occur to the recollection.
When we plough the sea, by steam, we do it
with the bhides of a circular paddle : why not
the earth? When we cut wood into saw-dust
by steam, we do it with the revolving teeth of a
circular saw ; why not the clod into soil as fine,
by the same mode of action ?

' What has the laborious dragging of a plough
to do with steam-mechanism, whose mode of ac-

174 CHBOXIGLBS OV A, CLAY FABM.

tioB lies in rapid revolution, which applied behind
yotur looomotiy« (which must travel forward on
the hard soil), could cut a trench a foot deep,
aad with itft case-hardaied tines, rasp away ihe
soil from the land-side to any pattern of fine-
ness, aft easily aft a saw can cut a board — ^taking
& moderate bite fire or six feet wide as it
goes *—

" 'Grently over the atones!* " shouted Mr.Green-
ingv as the sudden cradi of a fallen tumbler woke
him up, and the opening door announced the
entry of luncheon — " * a bite six feet wide ! * my
heart I who wa« it took that. Sir ! What a hap-
py-tight he must have had! What, limcheon
already ! well, it's uncommon interesting, I*m
sure ! Why, you'll be quite an Inventor ! It's
for all the world like what my little girl reads
out to me o' nights from her * Life o' Columbus '
— somewhere in the beginning part, where he
talks to himself so, till they all thought him out
of his wits. I'm blest if it aint just like Co-
lumbus, as diskivered America ! — ^You ought to
take a, pattern out. Sir. "

" Did Columbus tctke out a patent. Greening P "
" Oh my ! that's capital ! a pattern for Ame-
rica! Well, that is a good un, however; no,
no, I guess his diskivery was a little too big for

THE 'POWBBS' THAT BE. 176

a pattern — * Wide as a world and broad as *iima-
nity,* as our parson says — ^No, no ! he died qtdte
the wrong side o' money-making, now I think of
it. — But I wish you *d a' talked it, now, instead
o* reading : for somehow the soft back of this
chair o* youm, and that — what was it— piping-
Dickler — ^my heart! what a word that was; it
sent me right off wool-gathering — I knew it
would ! I just shut my eyes to think it over a
bit — ^and I was off like a shot. What is the use
o' them long words^ — ^they're just for all the world
like the SpanisH onions, — haVt half bb much
flavour in 'em as the little uns. That's what
comes o* travelling abroad now ! Blesh ye, them
B/Omans and Antidaluvians as you 'a' been
amongst, don't know no more about farming than
a lot o* cockney tailors, for all liieir long words.
Now do just try. Sir, if you can't slice it wp like,
into small uns, so that a plain man can imder*-
stand it—'*

"And make it so plain that every one as

lie reads shall think he knew it hefbre. Well— -
oome — we'll talk it over in plain English after
Itmcheon. "

XX.

THE PLAIN ^ENGLISH* OF IT.

What a curious, complicate, half-interestiiig,
half-proToking problem is thair presented by a
shrewd, practical, experienced, and well-poised
mind, without education. Of course I am not
speaking of that education which every active
mind, learned or unlearned, is daily picking up,
from the first entrance into real life, till *the
night cometh when no man can work* ; but that
particular appropriation of certain early years to
the school-room process, (such as it still is !) by
which the mind is kneaded, and tempered, and
subdued, during its only plastic age, into that
peculiar tilth and texture, whose after-benefit is
known, not by the acquisition of the prescribed
formulsB and rudiments of knowledge, but chiefly
by the having learnt the art of learning. If the
knowledge that is carried away from school, or

THE PLAIN * ENGLISH' OF IT. 177

college, were all. Heaven help our First-class-
men and Senior- wranglers ! But if you want to
know the real value and blessing of that tedious
operation that seems to cut up our early liberties,
for so many years, into * morning and evening
lessons,' watch the efforts of a naturally strong
and gifted mind, struggling in the after-years
of life against the stereotyped effects of early
neglect.

There is no class, probably, in society, amongst
whom more striking instances of this occur than
the agricultural : none, perhaps, in which there
is less of what is called * book-learning ; ' none,
certainly, in which there is more of naturjd
shrewdness, and a sort of furtive observation
which shrinks from being itself observed ; pay-
ing the tribute of a kind of secret intelligence
and appreciation to qualifications and attainments
which it never affects, and, to the careless eye,
appears to despise. But it discriminates nicely.
For Nature is a schoolmaster that teaches with-
out spelling-books. To the husbandman, toiling
early and late, her rede goeth forth, but it is not
speech nor language : it inwardly informs : and
as the teacher teaches, so the scholar learns.

Such was the case with my good friend Mr.
Greening ; for I have tried to delineate his cha-
ir

178 CHBONICLSS OP A OLAY FARM.

meter, which was an admirable type of a class gtiH
little understood, and caring little to be so. I
knew that he would be * asleep' daring my ser-
mon *on cultivation :^ and he knew that I knew
it; and would not have been awake under the
affliction of so many long words for his life and
oharacter^s sake. But to sleep without an eye <»
ear left for sentry-duty — ^that was far from Ben-
jamin Greening. And I, for my part, was satis-
fied with my audience ^ the more so, because I
knew that I should find in him an objector, who
would not fail to start every difficulty whidi
feigned ignorance, or practical knowledge, was
likely to suggest.

Mr. Greening, however, was taken with a kng
fit of silence. Luncheon came and went ; and
that preoccupying subject he discussed amply
and seriatim in all its branches : but I could see
that my dose was not inoperative. The vindi-
cation of his old friend the Plough was hot within
him, the while ; struggling only with a curiosity
to hear the translation into plain English that I
had promised him ; and which, he knew, would
open plenty of points of attack more assailable
than the compact and synthetical phalanx of long
words he had interrupted so opportunely at 'the
stones.'

THE PLAIN 'ENGLISH* OF IT. 179

" So we're not to liave a Steam-PfouyA, then,
after all— eh, SirP" he at last began. "Well,
XVe heerd talk of it so long that I hardlj know
whether I'm glad or sorry. But, lor' blesh ye,
yon go too fast : the Flough^s too old a stager to
be got rid of that way. Steam I do suppose it
mil be some day : there I suppose you're right
enough. But if we're to wait till tbis what-
d'ye-call-it, French-revolution sort of thing,—
well — ^I beg pardon — ^this merry-go-round Co-
nundrum o'yours [Well, wellT whatever it is,
then] is brought to pass, — ^why, it's like waiting
for two tkvMfs instead o' one. No, no ! plough-
ing it must be : it is, however, a'ready ! for I
hear talk o^ one or two people as are^^ing it on.
There's some lord, I forget his name, has written
a book all about it, with a picture a yard long,
where it's all at work as nice as can be ; an en-
gine at each end, and the ploughs a-drawing
away in the middle. He's afore you, entirely;
for there it is, actshaUy a-ploughing with com-
mon ploughs — in the book. "

"Listen to me, you old perversity. I have
seen that 'book' as you call it. The pamphlet
reached me long before you saw it ; but not till
long after the idea it porhrays had been as fa-

180 CHBOKICLE8 OF A CLAT FABlf.

ttuliar as an old family-picture to my mind's eye
and banifihed, in its turn, before ever engraver'a
tool had given it outward form and semblance.
If ploughing were ever done by steam, that were
no doubt the most obvious way, and as good a
way as any. But I hold it to be an idea fitnda-
ittentally erroneous to attempt to combine steam-
machinery with the plough ; and record my con-
viction that untU the idea of the plough, and in
a word, of all i>ra«^A^-cultivation is utterly
abandoned, no effective progress will be made in
the application of Steam to the tilling of the
earth. I repeat that ' ploughing ' is a mere con-
trivance for applying ammal-power to tillage.
Get out of animal-power, and you leave * plough-
ing' behind altogether. Get into steam-power
and you have no more to do with the plough,
than a Horse has to do with a spade. It ia no es-
sential whatever of cultivation that it should be
done by the traction of the implement. Spade-
work is perpendicular^ Horse-work is horizontaL
Machine- work is circular.

Who would now dream of retaining the form
of the Flail in the Threshing-machine, or that
of the Oar. in a steam-ship, or of putting the
piston-rod to work at the lever-end of a pump-

THE PLAIN 'ENGLISH* OF IT. 181

handle? Yet doubtless tliese piebald attempts

were all made in their day, till the several in-

yentors had come to see in torn that

*'Ti8 gude to be off with the old love
Before ye be on wi' the new ! *

But no one can imagine, without trying it, the
difficulty of making the mechanical part of the
question intelligible to the agriculturist, and the
agricultural part to the machinist. The steam-
engine has no taste whatever for straight draught.
He is a revolutionist, in the most exact sense of
the word. He works by revolution : and by re-
volution only will he cut up the soil into a seed-
bed, of the pattern required, be it coarse or fine*
And that, it is my firm belief, he will be seen
doing at a handsome average, before a very large
portion of another century shall have passed
over. Why should it not be P Why should not
a strip or layer of earth be cut up into fine soil
at one operation (and sown and harrowed in;
too), as easily as a circular-saw cuts a plank into
saw-dust P But when you come to employing

a Steam-engine

to turn a Drum,

to wind a Eope,

to drag a Plough,

to turn up a Furrow,

182 CHB0NICI.E8 OF A CLAT FABM.

and all thiB as a mere prelude for aa after-amuse-
ment to aU tke auoient tribe of harrows, scuffles,
rollers, and clod-crushers, to do supplementally
the real work of oultiyation, it reminds one of
'the house that Jack built/ One can hardij
blame the iron ribs of any respectable boiler
for bursting at the first pull, in a task bo uttarly
at variance with every known law of meeha-
nical progress, so repugnant to the economics, I
had almost said the very ethics of the steam-
engine.

I trust to be some day forgiven for so boldly
speaking ; but I am sorry to think of one useful
shilling being thrown away in the attempt, un-
profitable even if successful, of harnessing steam
with horse harness, to do horse*s work in a horse's
way ; the implement itself, whose wretched work
(on clay soil) it is put to accomplish, being a tool
with sentence of death written upon it, be it as
ancient as it may, for its tyranny to the sabaoil,
which bears the whole burthen and injury of its
laborious path.

I say the Plough has sentence of death written
upon it, because it is essentially wiperfect. What
it does is little towards the work of cultivation ;
but that little is tainted by a radical imperfec-
tion — damage to the subsoil, which is pressed

THB FLAIir 'BNGLI8H' OF IT. 183

and hardened by the share, in an exact ratio with
the weight of soil lifted, plus that of the force
required to effect the deavage. Were there no
other reason for saying it than this, this alone
would entitle the philosophic machinist to say,
and see, that the plough was never meant to be
immortal. The mere invention of the gubsoiler
is a standing commentary on the mischief done
by the plough.

Why then should we struggle for its survival
under the new dynasty of Steam P The true
object is not to perpetuate, but as soon as possi-
ble to get rid of it. Why poke an instrument
seven or eight inches under the clod, to tear it
up in the mass by main force, for other instrU'
fuents to act wpon, toiling and treading it down
again, in ponderous attempts at cultivation whole-
sale,-— when by simple abrasion qf the surface by
a revolving toothed instrument, with a span as
broad as the hay-tedding machine or Cbosskill's
clod-crusher, you can perform the complete work
of comminution in the most light, compendious,
and perfect detail P

Imagine such an instrument (not rolling on the
ground, but) performing independent revolutions
behind its locomotive, cutting its way down by
surface abrasion, into a semicircular trench about

184 CHBONICLES 07 A CLAY 7ABH.

a foot and a half wide, throwing back the pfol-
verized soil (as it flies back from the feet of a
dog scratching at a rabbit-hole) : then imagine
the locomotiye moving forward on the hard
ground with a slow and equable mechanical mo-
tion, the revolver behind, with its cutting-
points (case-hardened) playing upon the edgcy or
land-side of the trench as it advances, and ca-
pable of any adjustment to coarse or fine cutting ;
moving always forward and leaving behind, gra-
nulated and inverted by its revolving action, a
seed-bed seven or eight inches deep, never to be
gone over again by any afler-implement except
the drill, which had much better follow at once,
attached behind with a light brush-harrow to
cover the seed.

It is hard, by mere language and withonta
diagram, to describe intelligibly to the mind's
eye an instrument that has not been seen ; fami-
liar as it has become to my own. My notion
may be wrong, but I am strongly induced to feel
that such an instrument alone will ever fulfil the
requisitions of the steam-engine, which shortens
and remodels eYeij labour it undertakes, and
never condescends to old appliances, except where
they are themselves intrinsically perfect in their
mode of action.

THE PLAIN 'EKGLISH' OP IT. 186

Why did Steam reject tke Pump-hafidle and
the Oar? Because, in both, the leverage is
obtained by loss of labour and time, occurring
during the back-movement necessary to the ma-
nual, but not to the mechanical agent. For the
same reason whenever it is applied to till the
earth, it will antiquate every instrument that
cultivates hy tradition, because traction is not only
not necessary to cultivation, but is inherently
mischievous on other grounds, apart from the
clumsiness, inaccuracy, and incompleteness of the
work it turns out.

But THE Stones! There is much fear ex-
pressed for the teeth of the circular-cutting im-
plement I have described, when they come in
contact with stones. The objection would have
been equally valid, at first sight, against the use
of the Plough or the ScufHer. Let me see the in-
strument in use where there are no stones — (and
there, are plenty of broad acres in England of
this class ;) and it will not be long before it gets
upon the others. If it cost five pounds an acre
to dear them out, it must be done, and would in
sticli case, well pay to do it. But the truth is
that the instrument itself suggests the kind of
machine which, with a little adaptation (greater
power and slower motion), might perform this

186 CHBOVICLBS OV ▲ CLAY FABM.

preliminary service at the least expense. If land
is to be like a garden in one respect, I see no
good reason why it should not in all. I do not
think stones wiU stand long in the way of Steam,
or be readily preferred to bread ; if, where there
happen to be none, a steam-driyen cultiTator can
be brought to bear, which, after the simple and
beautiful example of the mole, shaU play out the
long comedy of our present field cultivation in a
single act, present a finely-granulated seed-bed
by a single process, almost at the hour required ;
and trammel up the * long summer fallow ' into
the labour of a day, with an accuracy as perfect
as the turning of a Lathe, and an aeration (and
consequent oiygenation) of the soil as difiusive
and minute as that of a scattered mole-heap, Gt
the dust flying from a circular-saw-bench.

Implement-makers and Tne ob<"iic i ff"<^ would
not be long in understanding aLL this, if they
were not under the supposition, received at se-
cond hand by them, and therefore the more dif-
ficult to eradicate, that ploughing is a neceseairy
form of cultivation to be kept in view. Once
let the Q.E.E. be clearly understood by them;
once let them be made fuUy to perceive tliat
' ploughing ' is merely the first of a long series
of m^ans towards the accomplishment of a par-

THE PLAIN 'BiraLISH' OV IT. 187

ticular end, th&t end being the production of a
seed-bed, of suitable depth and texture, and with
the soil as nearly as possible inverted in its bed
— and I do not think they will be long in setting
the steam-engine about its proper task, in the
proper way. But their attention is distraeted, at
present, fix>m the end to the means. They are
taught to think that the plough is a sine qvA mm
— that steam-cultiyadon of necessity implies
siesum-phughing, and they are led to give up the
task in despair, because they are at fault upon a
false scent.

We have many rolling implements employed
in the field, but we have only one instance of a
revolving implement. The clod-crusher and ihe
Noorwegian-harrow roll, the hay-tedding machine
(one of the best instruments ever invented) re-
volves, I use the words somewhat arbitrarily,
but the difference I allude to is very important.
The first are liable to the evil of * clogging ;' be-
cause they derive tlieir axis-motion from the soil
as they pass over and j>r«M upon it. This action
must not be confounded with that of a machine
which has its cause of revolution within itself)
independent, and acting upon the soil as a circular-
saw acts upon a board, or the paddle-wheel of a
steamer upon the water. The teeth of a saw

188 CHBOKICLBS OF A CLAY FABH.

dear themselves, by the centrifagal motion tihey
communicate to the particles they have detached
from the substance they act upon. A circniar
' cultivator * steam-driven will do the same. It
does so more effectually according to the velocity
of revolution and the state of the soil. This last
incident is as it should be ; for it is not desirable
that a clay soil should be dealt with when not in
a proper state for tillage ; and one great advan-
tage of such an instrument as I point to would
be that it would so immensely enlarge the choice
of period, by its compendious accomplishment of
the whole work of culture.

My object, however, is not so much to advo-
cate the particular mode of applying Steam-
power which I myself suggest, as to explain the
grounds on which I feel more and more strongly
assured that the attempt to employ it through
the medium of the plough must be eventually
renoxmced."

"There's one thing, " said Mr. Grreening, who
had been listening throughout with unusual at-
tention and perseverance, and nodding know-
ingly at the end of each sentence, as if the idea
was steadily gaining ground upon his mind, —
" There's one thing that you have n't mentioned,
and on your own side of the matter, too. The

THE PLAIN 'ENGLISH* OF IT. 189

finer the soil 's worked down, the greater the
effect of the manure : of that I'm certain sure ;
large as I like to see the clods on a fallow."

" I was afraid you would have taken the other
side of the question on that point/' said I, ** on
which a good objection may be taken, — and an-
swered, too ; and which we must not omit : but
it was not because I had said my say out, that I
came to a pause ; but rather because I felt that
there was still so much unsaid, and I am too tired
to say it now, and you to listen to it, I should
think. Come, it's no use denying it. We must
adjourn. Besides,. I want to hear your objec-
tions. I know they *U rise thick and threefold,
when you've left me. When shall I hear ihem ;
to-morrow P "

" To-morrow let it be with all my heart ! I
doubt you've given me a bad nightcap, though !
When I get a subject of this sort into my head,
it sings in my ears half the night : and when at
last I (io go to sleep, I dream of it till I 'wake
again. Well ! ' In for a penny,' as they say : so
I shall be glad to hear it out. Maybe you 'U
finish it to-morrow. I don't think I shall ever
look at a plough again without thinking of you ! "

And Mr. Greening took his departure; not
more busily iaaipregnated with a new subject than

190 CHBOVIOLE8 OF A GLi.Y FABK.

he left me with an old 0116 : for of all the stitnii-
lants to deeper thought in your own mind, what
80 powerful as the first sustained effort to de-
Telope your earlier conceptions hy the alow and
detailed process of conyersation, and that with
a not too easy or nnobjeotiye listener? Idle
and yalneleea as yet, as the unsmelted Ore, is
the Thought that has not been stroek out into
the current coin of simple words. And tiuB
once accomplished, who shall say where that
currency may lead, or in whose hands it may
yet thrire, hereafter ?

XXI.

THE 'STEAM-CULTIVATOR'

What an iiresistible tendency there is amongst
men to draw each other in caricature. How prone
we are to magnify those features in which the
character of another differs f5rom our own ! I
doubt not that if Mr. Greening had described
our late interviews ("if the lion had been the
sculptor ") our readers would hare been at least
as much amused, the other wcnf. I should like
mnch to see the * per contra * that he would have
drawn out.

I am justly led to this conclusion because my
notes of our further conversations show how
completely I had under-rated both his interest,
and his penetration, in the snbject I had so sud-
denly broached before him ; taking it too readily
for granted, that a thoroughly practical man, like
himself, could not stretch his imagination to the

192 CHBONICLES 07 A CLAY FABM.

point required to make him enter into my yiews,
or the suggestions I had made.

This was far from being the case. He had
heard, I suspect, and interpreted too, after his
own fashion, every word I had said and read to
him. For, after our kte-described interviews,
his * trespasses,' as he called them, on my Farm
became more and more frequent. Whether it
was that he thought the demerits and deficien-
cies of the plough were more strikingly to be
seen and freely studied upon my soil than on his
own, or whether he reckoned upon the chance of
hearing them more boldly outspoken, I will not
attempt to decide : but for some reason or other
I soon found him a frequent, and by degrees a
more (so to speak) long-winded listener. Not a
week had elapsed after our last conversation,
when a rainy day drove him into my den for
shelter, and as ready a prey as any beast that
ever roamed the wilds of agricultural theory
could desire.

*' I'm afeard," he began, aft«r ensconcing him-
self in the very same chair, with one of the very
same cigars, opposite the same fireplace, and in
precisely the same attitude — " I'm afeard it won't
leave off for some time. I should like to hear
you owt. Sir, about that Steam-ploughing — ^I b^

THE * 8TEAM-CULTIVAT0B.* 193

pardon — steam wo^plougliing — * cultivation*—
anything you like to call it, that you was on about
the other day. I don't know how it is, but it
seems to haunt me like. YouVe done me harm
["Hal"P] you have indeed! I used to love fol-
lering the plough, and see it heave up the fur-
row-slice so smooth and nice, and swelling the
rich earth as it swam along, better than anything
else I know on earth — except, perhaps, hearing
my little Fanny reading when I come home sleepy
at nights, — but now — I don't know how it is,
I seem to run my head again' it every time I
see it, on stiff land, a-squeeging and pressing, and
kneading its way along : it gives me the very
headache to look at it; it does really! Now,
please not to mind about the long words, for
once ; but let me hear it on to the end. I should
like to know the worst on it — and the best, if
there is any. I want to know, now, really, why,
if Steam's the proper thing — ^why it has not been
done. They do most things by steam now-a-
days : if it is to get upon the fields, why don't
it? What stops itP"

" You have asked," said I, " the very question
I ask too— Why is it that amongst all the great
inventions of the day, the subject of cultivation
BY BTEAM seems to hang fire P Not for want of

o

194 CHB0KICLE8 OF A CLAY FABH.

thought upon the topie; for there are many
minds Aill of thought about it, and few }»eople
now-a-days believe tiie thing impracticable : in-
idfied no one can find any good reason why it
should be so. There is no particular difficulty
ixt peculiarity about the mechanism of coltiya-
tion, to " forbid the banns " between the soil and
ihe steam-engine : it is generally felt that the
match will take place some day, slow and un-
promising as the courtship may seem at present
I join hands in this belief ; and in the Tnft»niiTnp
ask your special attention to tiiese preliminary
points, which may help to account for past delay,
and possibly to advance the question finom its
present silent condition. Silent, because inv^i-
tion is apt to be so. Self-interest keeps it so ;
and in the meantime a generation may pass by,
and nothing be practically done towards a con-
summation which, once accomplished, it requires
no ghost to see that Great Britain would leap
ahead in agriculture as much as her mines of
coal and iron, and her still deeper and ridij»
mine of mechanical sldll and improvement, have
led her to do in every art and manufacture upon
which the breath of steam has been brought to

Here in fact lies the grand motive ia the

THE * STEAM-CULTIVATOE.* 195

matter; and one so emphaticaily important in
reference to this particular application of steam-
power — ^yet to be achieved — ^that one cannot help
wishing that all who reaUy think at all about
it — ^who are not of that class of infidels who
think the womb of invention is age-stricken, and
that nothing is possible but what has been done
— ^would come into conmdttee upon the subject,
imd abating a little of that exclusive faith which
each has in his own cleverness and chance, would
help to bring in this tide, as the tide of human
progress is wont to come in — ^not by one great
wave, aU at once, but a great many waves after
and upon each other.

There is one grain of comfort, and of eorres^
ponding hope, visible already. A good many
thijikers have got quit of the ^i^dan-ploughj and
got as far as the spade : that is something. It
is something, I repeat, to have got to the spade ;
for those who have got thus far will not stay
long there. The public mind moves slowly ; but
once in motion, the inertia once shaken off, and
the vis inertia once set agoing, it will never stop
till it reaches the goal.

Again and again be it repeated, that it is not
plcmghingy neither is it digging, that we want.
These are only means. What we want is tho

196 CHRONICLES OF A CLAT FABH.

end : we care not for the process. Give me a
SBED-BED : show me the soil comminuted, aerated,
and inverted, six or eight inches deep, and I will
not ask you how it came so. What does that
matter P If you wanted your coffee ground for
breakfast, to a certain fineness of texture, would
you be very particular to ask whether the mill
that crushed the fragrant berry had worked by
horizontal, vertical, alternate, elbow-crank, or by
circular motion P If the farmer or the gardener
could only have his seed-bed made ready for him
as fine as a new mole-heap, or to any other
coarser texture, according as he wants it, do you
think he would care whether the soil had been
first cut into longitudinal strips, plough-fashion,
or into square cubes, spade-fashion, before it was
finally granulated for use P Surely the one is as
indifferent as the other ; and singularly enough,
both offer problems far more difficult to the
steam-engine (if anything can be called so), than
the performance at once of the ultimate and en-
tire process without these preliminary forms at alL
Until steam-power was discovered, this possi-
bility did not exist. Wind and water power being
out of the question, there remained nothing for
it — ^no other power that could be taken to the
field — ^but men or horses. Ploughing or digging,

THE * 8TBAM-CULTIVATOB.' 197

then, were the indispensable preliminaries : there
was no getting on without them : they were but
preliminaries, it is true, the former leaving erery-
thing, the latter a great deal (according as the
work was done) to be accomplished afterwards
to complete the cultivation.

But it is not so now. Since the birth of the
steam-engine — ^no such very long time ago — ^the
whole elements of the question are altered. There
exists now a portable power — not limited to ho-
rizontal action like the horse, nor to vertical ac-
tion like a man with spade or hoe, — ^which if
merely told what to do will go and do it, merely
dropping a hint into your ear that circular mo-
tion is its favourite.

But the willing giant stands idly panting and
smoking : for nobody can agree to tell him what
to do. One says, " go and plough ! " another
says, ''go and dig,* each mistaking the means
for the end, and trying to yoke this youngest
bom of human genius to the peddling routine of
ina.nua.1 or equine capacity ; out of the very per-
versity of backsightedness that clings to forms
and modes which belonged to the implements not
to the ta^h — ^backsightedness that would with
equal reason puzzle its brains in looking for the
pole and splinter-bar of a locomotive, the pen-

198 GHB0NICLE8 OF A CLAT FABM.

dulum of a watch, or the paddOie-boxes of a Bcrew-
Bteamer.

But if it is not ploughing, and it is not digging,
what is it P " Go to the Mole thoa dnllard " (Hie
old proverb might be travestied), ** consider her
ways and be wise " — ^who without any coulter,
share, or mould-board, without spade, hoe, or
pickaxe, leaves behind her in her rapid track a
finer mould than ever Eaksoms, Howabd, car
Cbosseill — than ever spade or rake produced,
or the most careful-handed gardener chopped up,
to pot his plants with. The very rabbit that
scratches his hole in the ground, or the fox that
scratches after him, — ^like a king-crab, to eat the
kernel and lie in the shell, — or the dog that
scratches aftet both, — the whole tribe of " claw-
f((k)t" in fact, — ^had scratched hard earth into
soft mould, before ever the plough or the spade,
or even the more ancient Hoe, had broken ground
on this planet.

Let us begin from the beginning : let us take
'Cultivation' itself into thought for a serious
moment, and analyse it into its simplest elements,
dropping all conventionalities of plodding custom.
What is it P How would you do it, if you had
neither plough nor spade nor hoe nor rake to help
you P Surely with the same tool that the Monks

THE * Bf BAM-CULTIVATOE.' 199

of La Trappe used to dig their graves, and in the
same manner ! If the mole, the rabbit, the fox»
the dog, are not sufficient indicators, take the
hand of man, glore it with hardened steel, mul-
tiply it a dozen or twenty times, till you have an
instrument as broad as Cbosbeill's clod-crusher>
each hand or claw with its separate arm forming
the radius from a central shaft, which bristles all
around with a forest of such arms, a sort of re-
Tolving Bbiabeus, not rolling — ^let that be espe-
cially remembered — ^but steam-driren, a thousand
doff'^wet if you please, for we must not even
mention horses, or we shall drop back into the
old Scylla and Charybdis of 'traction' and of
* rolling,* — ^two ideas to be eschewed like poison.
Let us suppose the picture of this formidable-
looking cylinder of claws to be sufficiently de-
scribed, for the moment — reminding one at a
distant view, of a half-breed between a hay-
tedding machine and a Cbosseill's clod-crusher
(but unlike them, — fdndamentally distinct from
any and every instrument that was ever seen
afield, as doing its work not by traction, not by
its rolling weight, but dbivbit by its axis, as the
steam-paddle, the circular-saw, the driving-wheel
of the locomotive, are driven,) supported by its
own apparatus, and abrading the soil with its

200 CHBONICLES OF A CLAY FABM.

armed teeth, first cutting its trench, bnrying itself
to the required depth, and then commencing ite
onward task, tearing down the bank (so to speak)
on the advancing side, canting back the abraded
soil, earth's sawdust, " comminuted, aerated, in-
verted " into the trench it leaves behind.

If I have failed in making the picture clear or
intelligible, it is yet not that about which I care
so much, as to " draw aside the curtain." The
idea of ploughing and digging stands like a thick
blind before the whole philosophy of the subject,
and screens the inventive mechanician firom the
simple application of his mind to the qtiod est
faciendum. His faculties are clogged, stupi£ed,
held in check by the pestering contemplation of
processes that enter not necessarily into the pro-
blem to be solved, nor need appear in its solu-
tion. They are unessential to the matter. They
became so the very instant the steam-engine toas
discovered; a power, and the only one we pos-
sess, that can be carried to the field, and j>ut into
an agricultural machine — like the mainspring
into a watch — ^to give it independent intrinsic
action within itself, owing nothing to, but en-
tirely separate from, the traction and progression
of the implement along the field. Hitherto there
is not even the attempt so to apply it ; it has never

THE * STBAM-CULTIVATOK.* 201

liad a chance. Every field-implement we have,
works hy traction — like the Pedometer that ticks
because the wearer marches; but with steam
for our mainspring we can make the watch tick
independent of the wearer. When we under-
stand that, when we have in idea and in fact de-
tached the w(yrlc of cultivation from the mere
progression of the implement, made them per-
fectly separate and independent, so that if you
ceased to proceed, your " coffee-mill " would still
be at worhy and only wanting fresh coffee to
grind ; then, and only then, shall we have laid
bold of the end of the clue that leads to Culti-
Tation by Steam ; for then, and only then, shall
we have begun to appreciate the real and imique
value of the new agent we possess. To suppose
that it would gear its noble faculty to the drag-
ging of ploughs, or the redoubled solecism of a
rolling spade-machine, is to overlook the axioms
of natural law, the fundamental relations and
exactions that govern the progress, and throw
light upon the history, of Invention.

xxn.

THE SUBJECT CONTINUED.

I CAN call to miad no practice, in the intercourse
with others, more improying, Bometimes more
humiliating, than the attempt to explain in clear
words to a listener not disposed to give muct
quarter, an idea with which one's own mind has
fceen long familiar. A large portion of what we
call our ' mind * consists of the Imagination, a
proverbial deceiver, painting images (as its name
implies) upon the retina of thought, apparently
aU real, but fading into dimness, crumbling often
into the utmost confusion and intricacy under
the attempt at delineation by the tongue- This
is of every day experience. But there is an-
other traitor not so commonly arraigned and
brought to trial, — ^the memory. What has long
been on our minds, we are apt to regard as we
do those faces that we have met again and again.

THB SUBJECT COKTIITUBD. ^3

and only become conscions of our ignorance when
we have occasion to address the owners by name.
' Talking makes a ready man, reading an exact
man/ says the old proverb. That laying out of
a subject in detail which talking requires, cloth
ing it in simple and intelligible language yet illus-
trated with analogies and metaphor, suited to the
individual addressed, is an exercise in itself sus-
ceptible of such improvement that one is some-
times tempted to ask, whether Language owes
more to Thought, or thought to language.

And thus, in the conversations that ensued with
Mr- Greening, derived from my original promise
to him to put this question of Steam-cultivation
into plain English, I soon felt that it is one thing
to see a matter as plain as a pike-staff before
your own mind prepared to understand it, and
a very different thing to make it intelligible to
those who have never given any express attention
to it before. In deference to its importance, I
will try to restate the whole question; drop-
ping, for continuity's sake, the dialogue form in
which the subject was, by frequent and usefdl
objections on his part, made to develope itself.

Before the discovery of Steam-power, and its
application to machinery, there was 910 stick thing
afl a mechanical power that could be carried

204 CHS0KICLE8 OF A CLAY FABH.

about, and applied where and when and How yon
pleased, except animal power. The plough, the
spade, or the hoe (with their varieties), ^rere the
only possible modes of effecting the task of cul-
tivation. The comparatively recent discovery of
steam-power altered the condition of human life
. in.this particular. The modes of action to which
cultivation was before limited, and which are ex-
emplified in the use of the three instruments
just named, became, on the discovery of steam,
no longer the necessary and only modes of per-
forming the act of tOlage. From the nature of
things it was morally certain that whenever that
new Power was applied to this act, it would be
through an instrumentality as different from the
plough, as the plough was from the spade. If a
man will only give himself the trouble to think
how total a revolution the application of steam
effected to the navigation of a ship, and the lo-
comotion of a carriage, he cannot very well fail
to see what is meant by the saying that a new
power requires a new process. It is a solecism
in art, as well as science, to attempt to yoke
steam to a plough. There is no affinity between
them ; any more than, as I said before, between
a horse and a spade.
I have foimd it inexpressibly difficult to get this

THE SUBJECT CONTINUED. 206

leading postulate clearly and once for all under-
stood. Till it is so it is hopeless to attempt
to proceed. The idea of an instrument to be
d/ragged through the soil, as a plough is, from
one end of a field to another, poisons more or
less, nearly every effort towards steam cultiva-
tion I have seen. How difficult it is to unlearn. !

When the attempt was first made to run steam-
carriages on common roads, it was soon found
that however good a macadamized surface might
be for a wheel to roll upon, under a carriage
drawn by horses, it broke away into a perfect
gravel-bed when the new power instead of pull-
ing the carriage, (the wheels simply rolling un-
derneath,) laid hold of the Wheel itself, and pro-
duced the locomotion of the vehicle by forcibly
driving that round. The very best road gave
way under the severe friction of this new mode
of producing locomotion, and so did the tires :
and nothing could be done till both road and
wheel were made of solid iron. The new power
requires a new process. Instead of pulling the
carriage it drove the wheel, and in driving the
wheel it tore up the stones of a granite road.

Let us put on our Agricultural spectacles,
and apply this parable. When Steam-power is
brought into the field, (audiat qui aures habet !)

206 CHB0NICLE8 OF A CLAY FASM.

it win " play out this play" over again. Its £i-
culty and virtue consist not in pulling vehicles
or implements, but in driving wheels : and when
steam-driTen wheels will tear up granite roads
into shingle and gravel, and move the Carriage
too, (for so it did, only not fast enough for modern
travellers,) what forbids the hint being taken by
the " audax Japeti genus," that have happily ap-
plied BO many accidental hints before, and the
same refractory giant being set to rasp up cleverly
and methodically with sharpened Mole-like claws
the tender soil, when he has shown his abOity to
tear so tough a one with the mere palm of Ms
hand ? And what forbids, either, that he should
spare off a little of his redundant steam in mov-
ing his own carcase along, meanwhile, at a pace
imder half a mile an hour P " What you save in
speed you gain in power ;" and an instrument
which completes the whole work of tillage, as it
moves along, will hardly be required to go much
faster. At that speed it would cover four acres
a day — not of * ploughing,* not of * harrowing,*
not of * rolling,* not of * scuffling,' not of ' rolling
again,* * cross-ploughing,' * clod-crushing,' * roll-
ing again,* * ridging up,' * sowing,' and * harrow-
ing in ' ; but of all these epithet processes i|i one
comprehensive act — and word — Cultivation.

TH]B SUBJECT CONTIirirEP. W7

Is it not astomshiiig, with sneh experieaces as
we Laye before us in England, that since the first
introduction of Steam power to the notice and
assistance of mankind, nobody has eyer yet atr
tempted to apply it in its own way to the defina^
ble and simple work of cultivation P It is put to
cut chaff, to make sawdust, to granulate powder,
to make pins* heads, to reduce all sorts of coa/irae
material into fine — and all by wheels, — circular
motion, and nothing else, for nothing else will it
accept,-^but nobody can persuade his mind to be-
lieye that by the self-same action, and no other,
it can cut up a seam of soil eight inches deep and
five feet wide, and leaye it behind granulated to
as coarse or fine a texture as the nature of the
seed or season may require, and inyerted in its
bed. It is not ploughing, it is not digging, it is
not harrowing, raking, hoeing, rolling, scarifying,
clod-crushing, scuffling, grubbing, ridging, cast-
ing, gathering, that we want : aU these ore the
time-honoured, time-bothered means to a certain
Eesitlt. That result is — a seed-bed: and a
seed-bed is, simply described, a layer of soil &om
six to twelye inches ia depth, rendered fine by
comminution, and as far as possible inverted
during the process.

You may call this 'Theory,* my good Mr.

208 CHBONICLES OF A CLAY FABM.

Practical, but I tell you it is Tbuth : simple,
philosophical, practical Truth. Since the Inven-
tion of the Steam JEngine, it might and may be
done at one process, as easily as before in twenty;
and it will be. Before we depart this life, w^e shall
see one more wonder moving upon the face of
the earth, something of this form and fashion —
to wit — a complete locomotive engine on four
wheels, the fore pair turning on a transome, the
hind ones fixed ; behind them (suspended) a
transverse, cylindrical shaft, three feet in diame-
ter, from five to six feet long, reminding one of
a cross-breed between a clod-crusher and a hay-
tedding machine, armed with steel tine-points, in
shape like a mole's daw, arranged so that the
side-lap of each claw may cover the work of the
other, and no interval or ridge be left uncut : the
extremities of the cylinder just covering the
wheel-tracks. This cylinder of claws you will
see raised or depressed at pleasure by the engine-
driver, and adjusted to slow or rapid revolutions,
worked either by cog-wheels, or geared from the
drum of the Engine. That is the " cultivator."
A platform from the Engine extends over it,
ending in a sort of moveable tail-board, which
may be raised or depressed at pleasure, to regu-
late the settlement of the soil which scatters from

THB SUBJECT CONTINUED. 209

it. The revolution of the cylinder is not against
but with that of the wheels, not dragging or re-
tarding, but rather favouring the advance of the
whole machine, which is moved slowly forward
by a detached force of about two horse-power
from the Engine.

When, at some future day, and by some pen
not yet out of straight strokes and pothooks,
there shall be written, for the edification of the
agricultural public, an historical sketch of the
* Base and Progress of Steam Cultivation,* it
is to be feared that some of the reflections will
not be of the most complimentary kind to the
genius or the faith of the generation that has
embraced nearly in one experience the develop-
ment of Steam Navigation, of the Railroad sys-
tem, the Electric Telegraph, and other kindred
appliances in the many-pathed field of practical
science.

* It was strange,' we way suppose our future
annalist to write, ' that amidst the blaze of sur-
rounding discovery in the arts that economize the
labour and advance the condition of man, an ap-
plication of steam-power that must surely have
pressed with such powerful motive and exigency
on a period when circumstances seemed especially
to evoke the mechanical resources of the king-

p

210 CHBONICLES OF A CLAY FASM.

dom, by way of set-off to its often-urfijed disad-
vantages in climate and in fiscal burdens, — should
have been long regarded rather with the apathy
evinced towards the cobweb speculations of dream-
ing enthusiasm, than dealt with as a practical
question by practical minds. While zealous agri-
culturists were eloquently excited once a year over
the weight of an ox, or the twist of animproved
mould-board, * Science * was satisfied, and ' Prac-
tice * seemed to tread on the heels of perfection !
Under such patronage, * Improvements' in the
established implements of tillage, were of course
as numerous as the moiety of twenty acres of
ground could conveniently accommodate for an-
nual Exhibition. A revolution impending over
Tillage itself was of course the last thing dreamt
of. It is ever so. True, a few black funnels
might be seen smoking in the show yard, and the
whirring drum of the steam-driven Threshing-
machine had, thanks to the jpreviotis invention of
a certain Scotch lawyer, made the agrestial mind
forget to expect, or its prizes to stimulate, im-
provements in the Flail. But the principal and
time-honoured act of agriculture proper, oi culti-
vation itself — stiQ laboured under its ancient
tribe of horse-adapted implements. The Plough
and the Harrow were still in the ascendant : the

THE SUBJECT CONTINUED. 211

instruments of equine-tillage were still received
as its essential agents ; and people who would
have smiled at the mechanical curiosity of a
steam- J^a*7, gravely anticipated the day when
some such combination would be triumphantly
achieved for the darling tool whose Heaven-in-
voked * speed * had long supplied the toast and
figure-head of * Prosperity to Agriculture.*

* Yet it can hardly be wondered at,' our aggra-
vating Critic will continue, 'that men should
have slowly and with such difficulty eradicated
from their minds a mode of tillage so long com-
pelled by the very nature and necessity of ani-
mal power : every child that has wept and smiled
over the * Death of Cock-robin * knows when he
hears

"Who'll toll the beU?
T says the Bull,
'Because I c&npull,* "

that Mr. Bull was guilty of a pun; that the
' pull ' of a quadruped is only horizontal ; that
his strength can be applied in no other way ; and
that when you employ a four-footed beast to
cultivate the soil you have no choice left but
horizontal traction, from one end of the field to
the other ; a mode of action which commenced
when the spade was abandoned in field-culture

212 CHRONICLES OF A CLAY FABH.

for the plough, and which was to contmue so long
as horse-power tillage continued ; and no longer :
since it formed (as the spade had already shown)
no necessary element of cultivation, and had no
relevance whatever with the action or capabilities
of the Steam-engine.

* Steam-power having however been hitiierto
chiefly employed in Manufactures, and its versa-
tile modes of application being unfamiliar to the
agriculturist, we can scarcely be surprised, that
even those few who gave a serious thought to
the subject, looked upon the Steam-engiae rather
as a piece of concentrated horse-power to be
harnessed as best it might to the existing horse-
worked implements, than as a New Agent, whose
entry on the scene of action enabled him to re-
consider the whole philosophy of Tillage, to
analyse it into its elements, to see what it is;
what it had been when confined to manual power
under the primeval dynasty of the Spade and
Hoe : what it was under the advanced but equally
special limitations of animal power, as exhibited
in the Plough and every other implement of
draught; and what -it might he under the wider
sphere of available process which the Steam-en-
gine presented. What was cultivation? Did
Steam-power offer any cheaper, better, or more

THE SUBJECT CONTINUED. 213

direct mode of performing it, than manual «or
animal power had done P Conld it accomplish
in one (ict the problem of converting the hard
clod into fine soil? Conld it, like the little Mole,
cut a seed-bed out of the solid ? If so, why en-
tangle it with implements foreign to its nature,
unessential to its action, and behind it in that
order of inventive progress whose deep-cut label
is * Vestigia nulla eeteorsum ' P

* But the Plough had left its ridge-and-furrow
impress not more in the fields than, alas ! on the
mind of the agriculturist- of that day. It was
long, and naturally so, before he could bring an
imagination preoccupied with the old-established
system of field-culture, to recognize its impend*
ing emancipation from the whole chain of subor-
dinate necessities exacted by the employment of
horse-labour. The old fable had become reversed :
the quadruped was riding the man : and to shake
him off was now the difficulty ! For a century
after its invention, the Steam-engine lay stiU-
bom to the soil, and the virtue unappreciated of
a new power which could antiquate mere imple-
ments altogether, and convert the cultivating
a^ent into a Ttiachine, in the strict sense of the
word; a machine whose locomotion across the
field was a mere collateral incident, not a means;

214 CHBONICLES OF A CLAY FABM.

aa the sheep, or ox, walks over the pasture to
crop it, but does not crop it hy walking.

* And yet it was somewhat strange, too, that
recognition should have been so tardy, and pre-
judice so ineradicable on this point, when we
reflect that modes of tillage already existed, bo
totally and specifically different in action from
all horse-worked implements, as those both of
the Spade and its more ancient congener the
Hoe ;* and that the perpendicular and very ef-
fective action of these manual tools, contrasted
with the farm-implements of draught, might have
dimly suggested the possible discovery of other
means of cultivation as different from all of these
as they were from each other. Any one who
had ever seen a nutmeg rasped away into fine
atoms against the armed surface of a grater, or
sawdust scattered in heaps from timber by the
teeth of a circular saw, and could find room in

* In the Southern Countries of Europe, as in ItaLv,
Spain, and Portugal, and in the offshoots of the latter,
— Madeira and Brazil, the Hoe is the almost exclusiTe
implement of (manual) tillage. The Spade is, origi-
nally, a form of the Hoe, adapted to more northerly
climates where the moistness of the soil increases the
labour of cultivation by forbidding the tread of the
workman on the worked land, and obliges him to
stand on the * land-side ' of the trench.

THE SUBJECT CONTINTTBD. 215

his imaginatiye faculty for the contemplation of
this mechanical process, side by side with the
agricultural fact that a seed-bed is only a layer
of comminuted soil a few inches in depth, might
surely (one should now suppose) have saved the
credit of his generation by some more congenial
suggestion for the efiTectuating of tillage by
Steam-power, than attempting to bind it down
to an apprenticeship in which Ploughs and Har-
rows, Eollers and Scufflers, or even the spade,
were still to figure as the rude terms of the In-
denture, as out of keeping with its genius and
aptitude, as they were non-essential to tillage
itself analytically regarded, apart from its con-
ventional modes necessitated by horse or hand-
power.'

Such will be the kind of after reflection thrown
back upon his forefathers of this generation by
our fiiture agricultural historian. * It is true,'
he will be obliged to add, * there were not want-
ing heaps of patents and pretensions crowding in
conftiBed succession on the public notice, during
this period of mental vacuity and decrepitude of
invention. Wherever there is a lack of grain
there are plenty of weeds to fill the gaping space.
There were plough-dragging engines, stationary
and locomotive, there were * ploughshares on cir-

216 CHBONICLES OF A. CLAY FABM.

cnlar frames,' 'reyolving spades/ aiid all the
train of piebald monstrosities and bifonn incon-
gruities that mark those periods of fabe geatatioii
and miscarriage in the annals of invention, when
would-be-discoverers, dashing blindfold at un-
considered combinations, are each profoundly
busy putttDg * new wine into old bottles ;* never
devoting one serious hour of studj to the simple
elements of the problem they undertake, — ^the
mechanical act to be accomplished, and the me-
chanical means necessary to accomplish it ; but,
(like the scribe who ventured a treatise on Chi-
nese Metaphysics, by searching for ' China ' and
*Metaphync8' in the Cyclopaedia!) — taJdng a
plough and a steam-engine— or a spade and a
steam-engine — ^as the inevitable sire and dam of
the fore-determined 'cross,' plunged headlong
into the labyrinth of complex and solitary con-
trivance how to join things whicb Nature had
put asunder.'

• " velut iBgri Sonmia, vanae

Fingentur species ; ut nee pes, nee caput xmi
Eeddatur formfle. # # # #
Infelix opeiis Sumiu4, quia ponere totvm
Nesciat /"

Such, we may anticipate, will be the storm of
keen reflection showered over our graves by

THE SUBJECT CONTINUED. 217

80ine writer of the end of this, or begimiing of
next century, who looks back upon the origin of
steam-agriculture from just such a point as we
do now on that of steam-navigation ; who will
be as familiar with the sight of soil pulverized a
foot deep, in one act, by surface abrasion from a
steam-driven cylinder [armed with the Talpa-
lian claw that " works i' the earth so fast," and
solves in the dark, beneath our very feet, a harder
problem !] as we are with ships of a couple of
thousand tons, driven through the water like a
duck with her web-feet at work beside or behind
lier, in either case obedient to the steam-law of
circulo/r motion.

XXIII.

MACHINERY OF THE CLAYS.

" Matter is infinitely dirisible/' says ihe pliilo-
sopher. " Cultivation consiBts in j^lveration,'
says Tull. ** The greater the comminution of
the soU, that is, the exposure of its internal *»-
perficies, the greater its power to absorb Ammo-
nia, the essence of manure, from that great store-
house of fertility — ^the atmosphere," says the che-
mist. " Soils," says the geologist, " consist of
three elements, Clay, Sand, and Lime ; the more
suitably they are inter-combined, the more fertile
the resulting combination."

All this looks simple enough. Yet in the ju-
dicious application of these few truths lie the
great practical problems of Husbandry! All
truth is simple : * Simplicity is the test of Truti'
Yet like the three primary colours, * Bed,* * Yel-
low,* and * Blue,* — ^bright, clear, and simple as

HACHINEBT OF THE CLATS. 219

they are to tke eye, how infimte their yarieties
of combination ; what scope for judgment, or for
error, in their admixture, or that of their Secon-
daries ; what ample room for blunder, what di-
Tersity of apparent 'accident* and mischance,
what damage of unlooked-for incident, and un-
allowed-for circumstance ! What open pathless
wastes for the blunderer and the empiric, what
narrow and difficult steeps for the student who
has the heart to climb !

Oh Agriculture ! thou science of sciences
without a School, thou Philosophy without a

* Porch' (even for shelter !) thou University of
unexamined graduates, all 'Masters' and no

* Students' — ^when will thy * degrees* be better
recognized, thy principles be more truly studied*
thy * privileges* be better appreciated, for being
the better understood. When will men consent
— condescend — ^to leaen — an Art that claims a
share of light, and illustration, and practical ad-
vancement, from every physical science that has
^rung into being, since Bacon traced out know-
ledge to its source ; and Chemistry, the philo-
sophy OF MATTER, gavc the best of posthumous
illustration to that great inductive theory that
rests aU knowledge on the one sole basis of Ex-
periment.

ZiSO CHSONICLE8 OF A CLAY FABli.

When that da^ comes — ^when the living che-
mistry of the Soil is accepted and understood.
not as an amusing and probable specnlation, the
vaguely suggestive subject of a * Lecture' before
a patronizing Council ; but as a solid, worbng-
day, every-day, practical, fact, — ^then the Me-
chanics of agriculture will not be far bdund!
Then the * touching truisms' of Tull— the Galileo
of agricultural science, the Luther of modem
husbandry, — struggling single-handed against s
whole Dark-age of ignorance and banded preju-
dice — ^will reach the * promised land' he saw and
pointed out with the finger of the seer, but was
never allowed to enter. Blending into the truest
of union with the after-discoveries of Davy, De
Candolle, Liebig, Boussinghault, and our own
not less deserving Way, and Johnstone, and
others of distinguished note — ^his theory of ' Cul-
tivation' will propound matter of deep thought
and combined action equally to the chemist and
mechanician.

When the simple mechanical idea of pulrera-
tion, conmainution, subdivision, or by -whatever
other long name men may please to understand
it, shall be seen in its chemical meaning, as con-
nected with the food of plants, the ' pasture of
roots* as Jethro Tull with appropriate metai^or,

MACHINEBY OF THE CLAYS. 221

described it, — ^tihen the claim and application of
the Steam-engine will be made out and recog-
nized, and the name of James Watt will be
fonnd as important to agriculture as that of
Humphry Davy.

It is a mere question of Time. We travel
slowly : and, lite lazy wheelers, throw back our
ears and bite the pulling horse : but if ever the
shadow of a coming event was visible before-
hand, even to the wwimaginative eye, this of the
true mechanism of Cultivation is one that is be-
ginning to be visible. Call the Seer * visionary,'
if you please. Visionary ! of course he is vision-
ary ! it is his place and office, his duty and pro-
fession to be so, and to bear the consequence !
He sees in * vision :* it is by far-sighted vision
that he catches sight of the "man's hand" in
the horizon, which others cannot see, and will
not believe till it touches their eyeballs. And
then tbey will swear they always saw it, and
will have forgotten that they ever didn*t see it-
The man was never yet found that would head a
deputation to carry the world's recantation and
apology to the derided prophet whose derided
prophecy has come true. With the advent of
the Fact, dies out the prophet's only distinction,
— to be ridiculed. Such was ever his fate ; and

222 CHRONICLES OF A CLAY FABH.

will be, to the end of time ; varied only by the
politer form and phase that civilization grves to
persecution.

Yet, in the present active progress of inven-
tion, the transition is so rapid between one phase
of our industrial condition and another, that the
difficulty of inducing men to realize the possibi-
lity of a coming discovery seems ahnost to tread
upon the heels of the after difficulty of recalling
the memory of a deficiency that has been sup-
plied. The paradox of today becomes the tru-
ism of tomorrow. And in spite of all her won-
derM advancement in arts and manufactures, in
spite of all her great names in every department
of practical science, there is no country where
both these phases of mind apparently so incon-
sistent with each other, co-exist more pertinaci-
ously, more permanently, than in England.

The truth is that, opposed as they appear to
be, they are the two sides of one and the same
character, a character eminently and essentially
practical, which cannot recognize anything but
what w, and will consent to look neither into the
future nor the past with a very patient gaze.
We smile at the imaginative habit of mind of the
German, and the precipitate quickness of the
iFrenchman; yet in fact through sheer prac-

HACHIKEBT OF THE CLAYS. 223

tical industry we surpass in effective progress
the dreams of the one and the qnick conceits and
anticipations of the other.

But inestimably valuable in result, this na-
tional character makes invention excessively dif-
ficult, except where it drops in as it were in the
course of business, suggests itself to the mind of
the workman, and in a workman-like way, to ease
him in his task, or to shorten a process done for
the thousandth time before the abbreviating
link in the chain of practical cause and effect,
forced itself upon his notice. Anything like a
priori investigation of a problem, — elementary
view of the principles lying at the root of a pro-
cess, — ^is with us the rarest source of invention.
Thus it is that a clever machine makes the work-
men employed upon it intelligent ; as the insect
takes its colour from the leaf it feeds on. Dis-
covery foUows discovery in rapid succession;
and each room in a cotton mill or manufactory,
— ^we are informed as we pass through, — pre-
sents an accumulation of little additions and im-
provements, a hive of ingenuity as well as in-
dustry, all resulting as it were, spontaneously
from the suggestive influence upon the workman,
of the machine that at once employs and instructs

224 CHB0NICLB8 07 A CLAY 7ABM.

Not SO in agriculture ! The educational effect
of the Steam-engine upon those it employs, so
strikingly yisible in manufactures whose date is
of yesterday, has here not begun its gracious
operation. Here the new power has not yet
come in to suggest new processes. The hind
ploughs as his fathers ploughed, as the Itoman
ploughed, as the Egyptian ploughed : and with
even less advantage : for in the dry soils and cli-
mates of Eome and Egypt the plough was ao
apter instrument of cultivation than in our damp
soil under our northern sky.

True, a better machinery has found its way
into the more intricate task of threshing out the
grain, and firom that it has stiU more reoen%
crept, hachwards, from the last operation of
threshing the grain, to that of reaping it. For
it is curious to notice, in passing, that it has be-
gun at the latter erid of the farmer's labour, — ^a
significant token perhaps of its ultimate direction
and success, in the earher details of field work
The Flail was the first to give way : and by the
ingenuity of Menzies, the revolving drum of the
Threshing-machine, beating out the grain, by
continuous circular motion, was substituted for
the alternate strokes of the flail, (just as in na-
vigation, the circular Paddle took place of the

MACHINBEY OF TSS CLAYS. 226

back-and-forward action of the Oar,) whilst the
horse-power was concentrated round a pivot, the?'
nearest approach horse-power has made to what
^pre commonly understand by the word Machin-
ery. This point achieved, the introduction of
tlie Steam-engine to that branch of farm opera-
tions was at once made easy. The right motion
e:risted be/pre the Steam-engine was brought to
bear upon it, *

Once let this be done for clay-soil cultivation ;
once let all that has been said and written, and
proved, about the properties of such soil, and the
properties of the atmosphere, the habits of plants
and instincts of roots, condense into an act of
mechanism whose aim and object shall be the
most perfect subdivision that can be eflfocted at a
single operation ; and the conquest of the clays
is achieved. It will then be seen that none
but a POBTABLE power could accomplish it, that
its practicability lay hidden in the womb of the
^ture, till the Steam-engine appeared, and ma-
nual and horse power were severally discarded,
the one to the garden, the other to the road,
where locomotion from place to place is a real
and primary object of the power and mechanism
employed.

The infinitely graduated varieties of soil that

Q

226 CHBONICLBS OF A CLAT FABM.

exist between the lightest sand and the stiffest
clay, preventing as they hare done that marked
line of different treatment that a more rigid con-
trast of the opposed qualities of sand and clay
would have suggested, — ^together with the further
variations of ' temper' alternating with the con-
ditions of wet and dry — ^have been too much per-
verted to the result of making the ag:ricultiirist
a Jack-of-all-trades. He goes out of a light-soil
farm into a clay, or vice versd, and plunges his
share into the new element with about as much
imconcem as his wife puts her duck-eggs under
a hen to be hatched and educated. Plump goes
the Httle brood of changelings into the first pool
of water, incontinently bent on their baptism of
native mud, to the consternation of the astounded
mother, who vainly pUes her claw in scratching
on the sandy shore for unsuited food, croaking
out her frantic warnings to the contumacious
family of webfoot. With about as intelligent a
philosophy as she exhibits under such distressful
aiid hopeless circumstances, has many a plough
been stuck into the clays. But nothing can ex-
press the truth in shorter phrase than that of old

Dobson

" I tell you, Sir,— it's a different trade f"
No wcmder then that ** the best form of the

MACHINEBY OT THE CLATS. 227

Plough is still matter of disagreement." It must
ever be so, as long as Clay and Sand are things
as opposed in nature to each other as positive
and negative. A stiff clay under a moist climate
the greater its mechanical disadvantage, and its
intrinsic chemical superiority, (and both are
fully admitted,) the more it seems to call for a
revolution in its mode of culture, for a sys-
tem peculiar to itself. In the arts, as weU as
in morals, * Difficulties are opportunities/

XXIV.

CONCLUSION.

Day after day, month after month, year after
year, the labour of the Husbandman beginB
a&esh. It is without end, middle, or begimmig.
It defies the * Unities* of Time, and Action.
And as its nature is, so must be its everlasting
development, literary as well as otherwise. To
give it a somewhat livelier tongue, to rescue it,
at least for an occasional hour, &om a tone and
treatment which under the boasted title of 'prac-
tical,' would scare away from its deeply interest-
ing discussion all that has adorned as well as
advanced so many other equally laborious and
less naturally attractive pursuits, was the motive
that suggested the too desultory chronicle of
deeds, of words, of thoughts, that these pages
have imperfectly recorded. A story without
an end, a soliloquy without a speaker, a dia-

CONCLUSION. 229

logae without a denouement, and, what is worse
than all, a 'Farm to let' without a Tenant!
Such is the discursive and informal shape taken,
as of its own accord, by a series of extracts from
a journal extending over many years, and of
which it will be enough if he who reads shall
haply say, he 'could have better spared a better'
tale.

But though it break and baffle every rule of
literary composition ; though it leave every in-
terest unsatisfied, every curiosity unquenched,
let it not be deficient in the one intransgressible
rule of Harmony — ^to end in the Key-note : and
so doing, let it speak at least with one consis-
tency, and leave upon the ear one simple and
abiding chord that may link it with pleasant
memories, and, if more and better yet than this
may be hoped, — may lighten and sustain the
solitary hour of some ftiture toiler, striving all
alone — and far away from suitable converse and
encouragement, to solve the tedious problem
presented by a difficult soil, and what is more
difficult liian that to cure or cope with, intract-
able opinions, and minds that no argument can
reach, no evidence assure.

Bowed by an affliction, for which life contains
no cure, and calendaring his remaining years of

230 CHRONICLES OF A CLAY FABM.

earthly solitude as a schoolboy marks off one by
one the weary list of weeks that must interrene
before the joyful hour that shall restore liiTn to
all he has lately parted from — ^the writer of these
pages was fain to welcome the emprise of a task,
which might have scared away, as indeed it had
done, all to whom life was not so dead, that ihe
only thing that could rise again upon it -was — a
blister.

Such was in truth the condition under wMch,
to the amazement of that surrounding world
called ' Friends,' and the consternation of that
critic's gallery, one's own tenantry, I ventured
on the solitary occupation of a farm whose deso-
late and repulsive features have been sufficiently
pourtrayed, and with little of exaggeration.
Steeped to the eyes in all those notions of science
and exactness which a Working University expe-
rience, and 'those Temples twain Inner and
Middle,' may be supposed to infuse into the
brains of younger sons, I plunged into my task
with all that sanguine and pedantic enthusiasm
best known, in farming, under the expressive
titile of * Fire-edge.' " A blessed thing," I have
before said, " is the untaught boldness of youth I"
a blessed thing in its way, and in its time
and place. It is as much intended, and has

CONCLUSION. 231

its appointed task, in the great Order and Eco-
nomy of things, as the most cautious sagacity
and profound experience of advanced life.
" There is that scattereth and yet increaseth ;*'
and He who appointed Life as an advancing
eicperience, appointed every part of it to ac-
complish, and to vindicate, its appropriate phase
and character.

So I now feel it, whether I mentally review
the enterprise, labour, and amusement of years
gone by, or whether I look over the compara-
tively reclaimed acres and shrub-embosomed
homestead of the once dreary spot it was my
privilege to find * thrown upon my hands' at a
moment when the drearier waste within defied
the outer landscape. Could the scene be pre-
sented to me again with the aspect it once wore,
I should hardly, even with the bought economy
of experience, have the boldness to attack it : but
if compelled to do so by duty or necessity, the
only difference in my course would be a more
resolute and comprehensive plan, based upon a
deeper reliance on the first instincts and judg-
ment, unchilled by the timid and discouraging
language which surrounding practice casts, in
nearly every district, across the path of the im-
prover in agriculture.

ZQli CHEONICLES OT A CLAY FASM.

Whence this timidity and this discourage-
ment?

With the attempt to answer this important
question my task shall be concluded ; and the
personal experience of a landowner occupying
the most difficult of his own farms, and striying
to " sound the bass string '* of the matter, by
assuming the actual circimistance and position
of those whose interests it was his duty to study
and understand, shall be stated, with such re-
flection as most suggests itself to one who, while
his spare shelves were filling with ' Agricultural
journals,* and the works of TuU, Mills, Liebig,
Johnstone, and others ' of that ilk,* stiU kept an
eye upon his Law-books.

The evil of retarded and discouraged invest-
ment ia the soil lies deep, and dates far back. It
is not the fault of the Farmer : he is the subject,
Ijie time-grown and created result of the L^i»-
lation, and Custom with the force of legislation,
that have made him what he is, and invested
him with a step-mother rdation to the soil By
the Law of primogeniture apphed to Land alone
of all other kinds of property and capital, you
have set on foot in this country a system which
has nearly reached its climax in the amassing and
aggregation of land into the hands of few and

OOKCLtJSION. 233

large owners. The ancient yeoman, tlie owner
orf lufi own famii is becoming or become an ex-
tinct genus aniTOalinm. By the enormous and
factitious costliness, delay, and difficulty attend-
ing the Transfer of land, increasing in an inverse
ratio with the acreage (for the relative cost of
' title ' to an acre is beyond all comparison greater
than that of a hundred, and of a hundred in like
manner to a thousand), you have secretly clenched
and fortified the process which entail and pri-
mogeniture had openly avowed and established ;
and rendered it impossible, on the common prin-
ciples of prudence or economy, for any one to
buy land (except for bmlding) otherwise than in
large, and increasiriffly larger quantities. The
tendency is not stationary ; it is still going on.
The man of wnall or moderate capital is be-
coming every day more and more effectually
ousted from the possibility of ownership in " the
earth," which " was made for all."

You point to France and Belgium, where there
exists an opposite law compelling subdivision,
with a still more evil tendency, if possible ; and
talk about ' political expediency,' and the mischief
of * morcellement* But must we rush into one
extreme to avoid the other ? or is our timid in-
telligence so scared that it cannot pause to dis-

234 CHRONICLES OF A. CLAY FABH.

tmguishTjetween a tyranny which enforces snb-
diyision, and that middle course which would
allow Land, like every other form of capital, to
adapt itself TiaturaUy to human need and circum-
stance, and wholesomely to exist in great and
small proportions P Or is our political philoso-
phy of such a school as to allow the supposition
that we have the moral right to ' capitalize' the
earth, and disfranchise seventy-nine eightieths
of the inhabitants of this country by * Act of
Parhament,' and the * Custom of Conveyancers*?
— [for it is authoritatively said — (and there are
no statistics to disprove it !) — ^that the owners of
land do not number above two hundred and fifty
thousand, out of a population of twenty millions !]
Instead of the soil being, as it was meant to be,
the first and best of Savings banks for capitals
of every size : to the Peasant and the Yeoman,
as well as the Duke and the Squire ; we assume
the audacious office of readjusting natural and
common right, and pronounce for a system vrhich
agglomerates land into hands that may monopo-
lize, but after all cannot themselves use it, and
cut down the whole interest of the rest of the
* agricultural community' to the rank and posi-
tion of 'Tenant-farmers.' They do not, as a
class, penetrate the meaning or the mischief of

CONCLUSION. 236

it : they are " to the manner bom ;" and think it
* all right * if they could only get * Tenant-riglit;*
(as if the hirer of an article of limited supply,
could have any * right' but what the owner may
choose to give him !)

But then a Lease ! What is the use of a
Xiease for the purpose of investment, unless it be
of long duration 2 JN"ay, it is often urged against
leases, that imder a good landlord farms pass
from father to son, and grandson, better with-
out a lease than with one : then why not as pro-
perty at onceP Why keep up the form and
farce of * ownership,' if its very excellence con-
sist in a virtual surrender of its exercise, except
to receive the * dividends' half-yearly, under the
name of * Rent,' and pay annually for the * repair*
of premises you never occupy P

Not that there are wanting many instances of
improving Tenants and liberal Landlords. Thank
Heaven, the worst laws are modified in practice
by the common sense of mankind, as well as the
best evaded by its ingenuity. It is the universal
and unprofitable substitution of 'tenancy' for
ownership, that is here spoken of, — the terri-
torial mapping of the country into dukeries
and squiredoms, the impounding of the soil
out of the action of free investment, and the

236 CHBONICLES OF A CTLAT FABM.

compression of its inviting and Tmexplored ca-
pabilities within the complicate trammels of a
fiction, — ^the fiction of an Owner that does not
occupy, and an Occupier that does not own.

Why should this be P Why should Xiaw, the
instant it applies to Land, depart from its sim-
plicity and even-handedness by making land,
alone of all other forms of property and ci^ital
(that fall under its occasional operation by intes-
tacy or disputed right), an exception to the gene-
ral rule of fair and equitable division P In lie
fi?eest of all free countries, where freedom is
* the law of the land,' why should not * the land*
itself be free P Why is it that so few will take
the pains to imderstand the question enougk
to see that 'primogeniture* is a thing which
families may make for themselves if they please,
like heirlooms ; but which the Law has no more
to do with than with the descent of my Lady's
Jewels to the next * my Lady,' though under the
Statute of Distribution of the efi*ects of Lites-
tates, they would be treated as personalty, and
divided accordingly.

Again and again be it imderstood, that it is
not the compulsory division of land that is ad-
vocated ; but simply the application to it of our
own existing law applicable to every other form

CONCLUSION. 237

of capitaly favouring neither its aggregation nor
partition, but leaving it to assume its natural pro-
portions and relation to the wants and habits of
society, like any other article in which Industry
invests its savings. Wrap yourself in the triple
armour of Custom, Prejudice, or Feudalism, im-
moveable admirer of primogeniture-6y-Za» ; but
know that every great and accredited writer on
the Wealth of Nations, &om Adam Smith to
John Stuart Mill, maiatains the freedom of land
from the feudal shackles of long entaU and pri-
mogeniture-by-law, as the prime and fundamental
rule of Justice to society in the matter of the
Soil. The change that we want is but little, but
that Httle underlies and interpenetrates the whole
economy of agriculture as a national business ;
and renders every acre uncultivated or half cul-
tivated, through the operation of legal trammels
upon the owner, a robbery upon the Labourer,
the Capitalist, and ultimately on the public purse.
It is the first, and the most natural of Savings-
bjonks to the humble, as well as of Investments
to the wealthy, capitalist. It is endowed with
the most natural and versatile aptitude to the
capabilities of both ; it belongs to the Spade as
well as the Plough. It is evident as an iostinct
to every mind, and needs neither proof nor ar-

238 CHBONICLES OF X CLAY FABM.

goment, that the soil is the * primest, eldest' in-
vestment of our capital: to risk our national
earnings and accumulations in an^ other channel
till this field is first exhausted, is a course that
men may indeed be driven to by the operation
of foohsh laws or customs, but which few, firom
either will or circumstance, would voluntarily
choose. It needed no small ingenuity of folly,
no small 'method in our madness' to prodnce
that timidity and reluctance of investment in
the soil which the disposable capital of this rich
country exhibits. It is almost vain to argue
against a feeling. Once make the cultivators of
the soil feelj as a body, that in the Land itself
they have really no interest beyond its annual
produce, and you poison agriculture at its source.
Shallow draining, shallow cultivation, shallow
reckonings, and shallow knowledge of his busi-
ness, are not naturally inherent in a man because
he is a ' Tenant-farmer :* but in a country where
the law (as happily with us,) reigns supreme, an
erroneous law applied to the land may by de-
grees really make it come to appear so. And
this has been the case with us : first by the in-
cessant recurrence of law expenses which our
system involves, pressing with every form of
costliness, upon the soQ, saddling every landed

CONCLUSIOX. Z39

estate, in addition to the owner, the clergyman,
the tenant, the labourer, and the poor, with the
maintenance of its Lawyer, — ^and secondly by
denying that last resource of inherited penury
and embarrassed ownership,, a free, speedy, and
inexpensive mode of Transfer. The periodical
ransacking which the musty muniments of^ an
interminable 'Title' undergo to enable a few
acres of land to change hands ; to say nothing
of those momentous occasions, death and mar-
riage, or the complete revision of the whole mat-
ter whenever a mortgage i& required, — ^form alto-
gether a tribute of such oppressive magnitude,
that Protection for the land from foreign com-
petition is a dream indeed, compared to the re
aUty of the much-desired Protection from * Law.
To fully develope and expose the extent to which
our antiquated system of Tenures, our long en-
tails strung with disconnected life-interests, our
conflicting institution of 'legal' and 'equitable*
estates, our prolix conveyances, and complicated
settlements, operate a» a charge upon the land,
an impediment to its exchange, a reduction of its
value, a drain upon the resources of the Owner,
a secret injury to the Tenant and the Labourer —
would be to write the heaviest satire upon the
struggle for Protection that has ever yet been

240 CHRONICLES 07 A CULT FABM.

showered upon a class powerful to acYneTe, if
they only willed it, the oompletest satisfaction
for the repeal of liie Corn-laws which an import-
ant body would command, or an intelligent com-
munity approve. Do what you will for land,
this lies at the bottom o^ and completely sur-
passes in importance all other * ImprovementB.*
Free the soil from the pestilent tyranny of parch-
ment, that the obsolete necessities and forms of
centuries have gathered around it, and more will
be accomplished for its increase in commercial
value, its preference as a field for investment, its
promotion of skill and invention, its contribution
to the employment and the happiness of the
greatest number, than all the mere physical im-
provements that could be enumerated or detailed,
were every *Clay Farm* in merry England to
supply its * Chronicle.'

THE BND.

JOXK BDWAXD TJLYLOB, PBUTTSS,
LITTLE QUXBN 8TBBBT, LUTCOLV'S IITV BIBLDS.

5, HsABlaTTA SftMMMT, COTSNT GaKDIK,

LoMooK, tfovemhtT Ut, 1855.

Mr. BEEVE'S

LIST OF PUBLICATIONS.

1.

Sir Edward Belcher, C.B.

The Last of the Arctic Voyages^

During the Years 1852-4, in H.M.S. Assistance, under the command
of Captain Sir E. Belcher, C.B., F.R.G.S. ; with Notes on the Natural
History, by Sir J. Richardson, Professor Owen, Thomas Bell, J. W.
Salter, and Lovell Reeve. With numerous coloured plates, charts, and
wood-engravings. «

Royal 8vo, 2 vols., price 36*. {Ready.

2.
Adam White, F.I1.S.

Popular History of Birds.

With 20 coloured plates. By Adam White, F.L.S.

Royal 16mo, price IOj. ^d. \Ueady.

_ .^

Dr. Daubeny, F.B.S.

Popula/r Oeogrwplvy of Plants ;

Or, a Botanical Excursion round the World. By E. M. C. Edited by
Charles Daubeny, M.D., F.R.S., Professor of Botany in the University
of Oxford. With 20 tinted landscapes in chromo-lithography.

Royal 16mo, price 10*. ^. {Ready.

4.
Dr. SeenLaan, F.I1.S.

Popular History of the Palms.

With 20 tinted landscapes in chromo-lithography. By Dr. Beethold

Seem ANN, F.L.S.

Royal 16mo, price 10*. 6rf. \Just ready.

An. reeve's list op publications.

5.
T. C. Archer.

A Series of Eight School Plant Diagrams^

Illustrative of * First Steps to Economic Botany/ by T. C. Akcher,
Esq. Published for the Department of Science and Art, Marlborongh
House.

Price 3j. 6^. coloured, 28. plain, per Diagram.

6.
T. C. Archer.

Firsi Steps to Economic Botany ;

A Description of the Botanical and Commercial Characters of the Chief

Articles of Vegetable Origin used for Food, Clothing, Tanning, Dyeing,

Building, Medicine, Perfumery, etc. For the use of Schools. By

Thomas C. Archer. With 20 plates. Published for the Department

of Science and Art, Marlborough House.

Royal 16mo, price 2*. %d.

*• An admirahle and cheap little volume, abounding in good illustrationB of the
plants that afford articles or food or applicable to purposes of manufacture. This
should be on the table of every famOy, and its contents familiar with aU rising;

minds." ATI.AS.

" As a cheap school book it is exceedingly well got up, and contains upwards of one
hundred beautifully lithographed drawings, arranged on twenty plates ; they repre-
sent various useful plants and their products." Guabdiah.

T. O. Archer.

Popular Economic Botany ;

Or, Description of the Botanical and Commercial Characters of the prin-
cipal Articles of Vegetable Origin used for Food, Clothing, Tanning,
Dyeing, Building, Medicine, Perfumery, etc. By Thomas C. Archer.
With 20 coloured plates.

Royal 16mo, price 10*. M.
*' Mr. Archer's volume, we are surprised to find, is the first popular book that has been
devoted exclusively to the commercial products of the Vegetable Kingdom — of that which
constitutes nine-twelfths of the whole conunerce in raw produc' Exaicikbb.

MR. reeve's list OF PUBLICATIONS.

8.
Mi88 Oatlow.

JPopuloT Oarden Botany ;

Containing a Familiar and Technical Description of Hardy and Frame
Plants, suitable for cultivation in the Garden. By Agnes Catlow.
With 20 coloured plates by W. Fitch.

Royal 16mo, price 10^. ^d, [Ready.

9.
Thomas Moore, F.Ij.S.

Popular History of British Ferns

and the Allied Plants ; comprising the Clnb Mosses, Pepperworts, and
Horsetails. By Thomas Moore, F.L.S., Curator of the Botanic
Garden, Chelsea. Second Edition. With 22 coloured plates by Fitch.
Royal 16mo, price 10 j. 6^.

10.
Miss Catlow.

Popular Field Botany ;

Containing a Familiar and Technical Description of the Plants most
common to the British Isles, adapted to the stndy of either the Artificial
or Natural System. By Agnes Catlow. TMrd Edition. In twelve
chapters, each being the botanical lesson for the month. With 20
coloured plates.

Royal 16mo, price 10«. ^d.

HB. RSEYlfs LIST OF FUBUCATIOIIS.

11.
Sir 'W. J. Hooker, F.B.S.

Ctirtis^s Botanical Magazine;

Comprising the Plants of the RoTal Gardens of Kew, and of other
Botanical Establishments in Great Britain, with snitable DescriptioDs
By Sir W. J. Hookee, F.L.S., Director of the Royal Gardens of Kew.
In Numbers, each containing 6 coloured plates.

Royal 8vo. Pablished Monthly. Price S«. M,
Vols. I. to XI., price Mlt, each.

12.
Sir W. J. Hooker, r.B.8.

Journal of Botany and Km> Miscellany ;

' Containing Original Papers by eminent Botanists, the Botanical News
of the Month, Communications from Botanical Travellers, Notices of
New Books, etc. Edited by Sir W. J. Hookee, F.R.S. With plate*.

In Monthly Numbers, Svo, price 2«.

13.
Sir Vr, J. Hooker, F.B.S.

Icones Plantarum ;

Or, Figures, with brief descriptive Characters and Remarks, of new
and rare Plants, selected from the Author's Herbarium. By Sir W.
J. Hookee, F.R.S. New series. Vol. V., with 100 plates.
Svo, price 31«. 6^.

ME. reeve's list OF PUBLICATIONS.

14.

Notes and Notions, on Created Things.

First and Second Series. By the Author of ' I!pisodes of Insect Life.'
With numerous wood-engravings.

12mo, price 5j. each Series.
** We cannot imagine a book that would take a deeper hold of the iinagmation."

ATHBiriBUM.

15.
Dr. Hooker, F.B.S.

The Rhododendrons of SiJcJcim-Himalwya ;

Being an Account of the Rhododendrons recently discovered in the
Mountains of Eastern Himalaya. By J. 1). Hookes, M.D., F.R.S.
With 30 plates by W. Fitch.

Imperial folio, price £3. 16^.

16.
Dr. Hooker, F.B.S.

Illustrations of SiMim-Himalayan Plants^

Chiefly selected from Drawings made in Sikkim under the superinten-
dence of the late J. F. Cathcart, Esq., Bengal Civil Service. The
Botanical Descriptions and Analyses by J. D. Hookeb, M.D., F.R.S.
With 24 coloured plates and an illuminated title-page by Fitch.
Folio, price £5. 5^.

MK. reeve's list OF PUBLICATIONS.

17.
Professor Edward Forbes, F.B.S.

Litera/ry Papers on Scisntific Subjects.

By the late Professor Edwakd Forbes, F.R.S., Selected firom his
Writings in the * Literary Gazette.' With a Portrait and Memoir.
Small 8vo, price 6*.

** This reprint of reviews forms a charming book of miscellaneous essays. The
criticism is genial, sensible, comprehensi've, and compasii It is not common to find
eminent scientific men ^ceful, easy, and piquant lUt4rateur$s but whenever each a
union of claims to pubhc favour is manifested, it should meet with honour dne. But,
besides beine a scientific professor, a critic, and litUrateur, the late Edward Forbes
was before all thines a man— genial, sympathetic, brave and true— a thorough good
fellow, as good a fellow as he was a naturalist. The reader cannot do better than
possess himself of this amusing and instructive volume, if he have a liking for science
without solenmit^^, criticism without ill-nature, and with knowledge of the subject;
pleasant talk with a definite result, and a sense of the oomic without the vuLear error
of turning all things to a jest." Globb.

18.
Sir W. J. Hooker, F.B.S.

The Victoria Begia.

By Sir W. J. Hookee, F.R.S. With four coloured plates by Fitch.
Elephant folio, price 21^.

19.
Dr. Badhazn.

The Esculent Fu/nguses of England;

Containing an Account of their Classical History, Uses, Characters,
Development, Nutritious Properties, Modes of Cooking, etc. By the
Rev. Dr. Badham. With 20 coloured plates.
Super-royal 8vo, price 21«.

MR. REEVe's list of PUBLICATIONS.

20.
Dr. LandsborOTigh, A.L.S.

Popular History of British Seaweeds ;

Comprising their Structure, Fructification, Specific Characters, Arrange-
ment, and General Distribution, with Notices of some of the Fresh-water
Algse. By the Rev. D. Landsborouoh, A.L.S. Second Edition.
With 20 coloured plates by Fitch.

Royal 16mo, price I0«. 6^.

*' The book is as well executed as it is well timed. The descriptions are scientific as
well as popular, and the plates are clear and explicit. It is a worthy sea-side com-
panion — a nandbook for every resident on the sea-shore.*' Economist.

21.
Professor Harvey, M.B.LA.

Fhycologia Britannica ;

Or, History of the British Seaweeds ; containing coloured Figures and
Descriptions of all the Species of Algse inhabiting the Shores of the
British Islands. By William Heney Haevey, M.D., M.R.I.A.,
Keeper of the Herbarium of the University of Dublin, and Professor of
Botany to the Dublin Society. With 360 plates.

In three vols, royal 8vo, arranged in the order <» «,- i g «
of publication j iS? i^ b

In four vols, royal 8vo, arranged systematically* »« 17 a
according to the Synopsis . . . J *

A few Copies have been printed on large paper.

** The drawings are beautifully executed by the author himself on stone, the dissec-
tions careAiUy prepared, and the whole account of the species drawn up in such a way
as cannot fail to be instructive, even to those who are well acquainted with the subject.
The greater part of our more common Algse have never been illustrated in a manner
agreeable to the present state of Algology." Gakdbitbbs' Chboiticlb.

ME. reeve's list of publications.

Professor Harvey, M.B.I.A.

Nereis Australia ;

Or^ lUastratioDS of the Algee of the Southern Ocean. Being Figures
and Descriptions of Marine Plants collected on the Shores of the Cape
of Good Hope, the extra-tropical Australian Colonies, Tasmania, New
Zealand, and the Antarctic Regions. By Professor Harvey, M.D.,
M.R.I.A. Two Parts, each containing 25 coloured platea.
Imperial Svo, price £1. 1*.

23.
J. Sanders.

Treatise on the Culture of the Fine^

As well under Glass as in the Open Air. By J. Sanders. With 9
plates.

Svo, price hs.

" We have examined, with no common interest, the work before ua; fov it wiU be
strange indeed if a man who can act so skilfully as Mr. Sanders should be unable
to oifer advice of a corresponding value. We have not been disappointed. Mr. Sanders*B
directions are as plain as words can make them, and, we will luld, as judidooa as his
long experience had led us to expect." Gasdbitsbs' CHXOinoi.B.

24.
Dr. Seemami, F.Ij.S.

Botany of the Voyage of H.M.S. Herald^

Under the command of Captain Kellett, R.N., C.B., during the Years
. 1845-51. By Dr. Berthold Seemann, F.L.S. Published under the
authority of the Lords Commissioners of the Admiralty. In Parts,
each with 10 plates.

Royal 4to, price 10^. each Part.

KB. RBOBSVE's list OP PUBLICATIONS.

25.
Dr. Hooker, F.B.8.

Flora of New Zealand.

By Joseph Dalton Hookes, M.D., F.R.S., etc. In 2 volumes

With 130 Plates.

Royal 4to, price £12. 12*. coloured, £8. 15*. plain.

'* The work is written in good plain English, with a view to the conveniency of colo-
nists, but without on that account being rendered in the smallest degree unscientific;
quite the contrary. Let us add, that the beautiful execution of the work renders it
a libraxy-book, eyen for those who are not interested about natural history."

GABsmrBss' Chboviclb.

Dr. Hooker, F.B.8.

Flora Anta/rctica ;

Or, Botany of the Antarctic Voyage of H.M. Discovery Ships Erehos
and Terror, in the Years 1889-43, under the command of Captain Sir
J. C. Ross, F.R.S. By Dr. Hookes, F.R.S. Published under the au-
thority of the Lords Commissioners of the Admiralty. With 200 plates.
2 vols, royal 4to, price £10. 15*. coloured; £7. 10*. plain.

" The descriptions of the plants in this work are carefullT drawn up, and much inter-
esting matter, critical, ezplanatoiy, and historical, is added in the form of notes. The
drawings of the plants are admirably executed by Mr. Fitch ; and we know of no produc-
tions from his pencil, or, in fact, any botanical illustrationa at all, that are superior in
faithful representation and botanical correctness." Athbitjcuk.

27.
Dr. Hooker, F.B.8.

Cryptoganda Anta/rctica;

Or, Cryptogamic Botany of the Antarctic Voyage of H.M. Ships
Erebus and Terror. Issued separately. With 72 phtes.
Royal 4to, price £4. 4*. coloured ; £2. 17^. plain.

10 ME. UBEVb's UST of PUBLICATIONS.

28.
B. M. Stark.

A Popular History of British Mosses ^

Comprising a General Account of their Structure, Fructification, Ar-
rangement, and General Distribution. By R. M. Staek, Esq. With
20 coloured plates.

Royal 16mo, price 10*. 6rf.

" Mr. Stark has given as full and instractive an account of our wild Mosses as can
well be desired. It is founded avowedly upon the long labours of Sir Williun Hooker
in the same direction, and this alone guarantees the soundness of the author's syste-
matic views. All the genera and species of ' Moss,' as that term is understood by
botanists, are clearly but succinctly described in the English language j and to aid
the learner in understanding the subject, we find twenty coloured plates admirably
executed by Mr. Fitch. When we add that the work has a good index, the reader
will require no further assuruice that it deserves to be strongly recommended."

Gabdenebs' Chboiticui.

" * Popular British Mosses ' is the best book we have seen ujpon the subject. The
plates are exquisite, and do justice to the grace uid delicacy of the originals."

GUABDIAir.

™

Miss Roberts.

Voices from the Woodlands ;

Descriptive of Forest Trees, Ferns, Mosses, and Lichens. By Mart
Roberts. With 20 coloured plates by Fitch.
Royal 16mo, price IOj. %d.
" The fsdr authoress of this pretty volume has shown more than the usual good
taste of her sex in the selection of her mode of conveying to the young interesting in-
struction upon pleasing topics. She bids them join in a ramble through the sylvan
wilds, and at her command the fragile lichen, the gnarled oak, the towering beech, the
graceful chestnut, and the waving poplar, discourse eloquently, and tell their respective
histories and vises." Britannia.

30.
Joseph "Woods, F.Ij.S.

The Tomisfa Flora;

A Descriptive Catalogue of the Flowering Plants and Ferns of the
British Islands, France, Germany, Switzerland, and Italy. By Joskph
Woods, F.L.S. With a plate.

8vo, price 18.v.

MR. reeve's list OF PUBLICATIONS. 11

31.
Mrs. Hussey.

Illustrations of British Mycology ;

Or, Figures and Descriptions of the Funguses of interest and novelty in-
digenous to Britain. By Mrs. Hussey.

Royal 4to. First Series, 90 coloured plates, price £7. 12*. M.\
Second Series, 50 plates, price £4. 7*. 6rf.

** This is an elep;ant aiid interesting book : it would be an ornament to the drawing-
room table ; but it must not, therefore, be supposed that the value of the work is not
intrinsic, for a great deal of new and valuable matter accompanies the plates, which are
not fancy sketches, but so individualised and life-like, that to mistake any species seems
impossible. The accessories of each are significant of site, soil, and season of growth,
so that the botanist may study with advantage what the artist may inspect with admi-
ration." MoBNiNO Post.

Sir "W. J. Hooker, F.B.S.

A Centwry of Orchidaceous Plants.

The Plates selected from Curtis's Botanical Magazine. The Descrip-
tions re-written by Sir W. J. Hookee, F.R.S., Director of the Royal
Gardens of Kew ; with Introduction, and Instructions for their Culture,
by John Charles Lyons. 100 coloured plates.

Royal 4to, price £5. 5j.

" In the exquisite illustrations to this splendid volume, full justice has been rendered
to the od^y formed and often brilliantly coloured flowers of this curious and interesting
tribe of plants." Westmiustkb awd Fokbiow Qvabtbblt Bsyzzw.

12 H&. reeve's list of publications.

33.
Henry Sowerby.

Comprising a familiar Account of Minerals and their Uses. By Henbt

SowEBBT. Witii 20 coloured plates.

Royal 16mo, price 10s. 6^.

" Mr. Sowerby has endeavoured to throw around his subject every attraction. Ha
work is fully ana carefully illustrated with coloured plates." Spboxaxos.

34.
Adam White, F.Ij.8.

Popular History of Mammalia ;

Containing a Familiar Account of their Classification and Habits. B?

ADAM White, F.L.S., of the British Museum. With sixteen coloured

plates of Quadrupeds, by B. Waterhouse Hawkins, F.L.S.

Royal 16mo, price 10«. 6^.

" The present increase of our stores of anecdotal matter respecting every krad of
animal has been used with much tact by Mr. White, who has a terse chatty way of putting
down his reflections, mingled with easy ftuniliarity, which every one accustomed daily
to Boological pursuite is sure to attain. The book is profusely illustrated.'* Atlas.

35.

Frauds "Walker, F.Ij.S., and H. T. Stainton.

Insecta Britannica;

Vols. I. and II., Diptera. By Francis Walker, F.L.S. With 20
plates. Vol. III., Lepidoptera : Tineina. By H. T. Stainton. Witli
10 plates.

8vo, price 25«. each.

ME. EBEVE's list OF PUBLICATIONS. 13

36.
Mi88 M. E. Catlow.

jPojmlar British Entomology ;

Containing a familiar and technical Description of the Insects most
common to the British Isles. By Mabia E. Catlow. Second Edition.
In twelve chapters, each being the entomological lesson for the month.
With 1 6 coloured plates.

Royal 16mo, price 10*. 6/f.

" Judidoiuly executed, with excellent figures of the commoner species, for the vise
of joung beginners.*' Aj>dbb8S ov PsssroBiTT ov thb Es^TOicoLoeiCAL Socibtt.

** Miss Catlow*8 ' Popular British Entomology ' contains an introductory chapter or
two on classification, which are followed by brief generic and specific descriptions in
English of above 200 of the commoner British species, together with accurate figiures
of aa>out 70 of those described ; and will be quite a treasure to any one just commencing
the study of this fascinating science.**

Wbsthhtstbb aitd FoBBies Qvabtbblt Bbyibw.

37.
John Curtis, F.Ij.S.

Curtis^s British Entomology,

Being Illustrations and Descriptions of the Genera of Insects found in

Great Britain and Ireland, containing coloured figures, from nature, of

the most rare and beautiful species, and, in many instances, of the

plants upon which they are found.

Commenced in 1824 and completed in 1840, in 193 numbers, forming 16

volumes, price £43. 16«. Now offered to Subscribers, new and in the best

coadition, with 770 coloured plates, at £21.

Be-issued also in Monthly Parts, price 3«. 6^.
Vols. I. to V. of the Re-issue now ready, price 42*. each.

" Vous savez qu'k regard d'un grand nombre d'esp^ces, leur determination reclame
le secours de figiures. II est done de mon devoir de tous indiquer les livres oil vous
trouvercz les meilltoires. Celui de M. Curtis, sur les genres d msectes indigenes de
I'Angleterre, me paralt avoir atteint V ultimatum de la perfection." — Latbeille.

"M. John Curtis, naturaliste Anglais, a commence la publication d'un Genera
icouographique des genres d'insectes et de plantes propres k la Grande Bretagne.
Lcurs caracMres y sont repr^sent^s avec la plus grande fid^lit^."— Cuvikb.

14 ME. reeve's list of publications.

38.
G. B. Sowerby, F.Ij.S.

Popular British Conchology ;

Containing a familiar History of the Molluscs and Shells inhabitisg
the British Isles. By G. B. Soweeby, r.L.S. With 20 colomed
plates.

Royal 16mo, price 10«. 6^.
" Mr. G. B. Sowerbj maintains the character of hia father and grandfayier as a
natoralist, and has here produced a very instractiTe volume as an introduction to the
study of shells. This work belongs to Mr. Beeve's illustrated series on Popalsr
Natural History, and is a worthy companion to some of the latter volumes, <h tlw
value and interest of which we have spoken when they were published. It will be
seen bjr the title that this work is confined to British shells. It will be found a m«t
convenient handbook at the sea-side, as all the more common sheila 2u% not onlr
described, but illustrated. It will serve as an admirable introduction to the great
work on ' British MoUusca,' by the late Bdward Forbes and Mr. Hanley."

39.
liovell Beeve, F.Ij.8.

Elements of Conchology ;

Comprising the Physiological History of Shells and their Molluscoas
Inhabitants; their Structure, Geographical Distribution, Habits, Cha-
racters, Affinities, Arrangement, and Enumeration of Species. Bj
LovELL Reeve, F.L.S. Parts 1 to 10, with 50 coloured plates.
Boyal 8vo, price 3*. 6rf. each.

"The work before us is designed to promote a more philosophical spirit of inqoirr
into the natiure and origin of Shells." Ecclssiabiicai. Bstuw.

40.
Lovell Beeve, F.Ij.S.

Conchologia Systematica;

Or, Complete System of Conchology ; in which the Lepades and Conchi-
ferous MoUusca are described and classified according to their Nataral
Organization and Habits. By Loyell Reeve, F.L.S. Illustrated with
300 plates of upwards of 1500 figures of Shells.

Two vols. 4to, price £10 coloured.

MR. UBBVB^S LIST OP PUBLICATIONS.

15

41.
Lovell Beeve, F.Ij.S.

Conchologia Iconica ;

Or, Figares and Descriptions of the Shells of MoUnscoas Animals, with
Critical Remarks on their Synonyms, Affinities, and Circnmstances of
Habitation. By Lovell Reeve, F.L.S. Published Monthly in Parts,
demy 4to, each containing eight plates, price 10^.

[Part 148 jtut published.
In MonograpliB :

ACHATIITA

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LUCIKA

LlTTBABIA

Mactba

£ «. d.
14

ACHATIKBLLA

Amphidesma

8

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7

16 6

Abca

Makgelia

MbSALIA & EOLIBIA

Mesodbsma

MlTBA

MoirOCBBGS

10 6

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BUCCINTJM

BULIMUS II

BULiLIA

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11

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Ptbula

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18

" This great work Lb intended to embrace a complete description and illustration of
the shells of molluscous animals ; and so far as we have seen, it is not such as to dis-
appoint the large expectations that have been formed respecting it. The figures of the
shells are all of full size: in the descriptions a careful analysis is given of the labours
of others ; and the author has apparently spared no pains to make the work a standard
authority on the subject of which it treats.'* Athbnjbvm.

16 ifu. reeve's list of publications.

42.
Mias Boberts.

Popula/r History of the Mollusca ;

Comprising a Familiar Account of their Classification, Instincts, and
Habits, and of the Growth and DistiDguishiug Characters of their
Shells. By Maby Roberts. With 18 coloured plates hj Wing.

Royal 16mo, price 10«. td,

** The aathoress is already favourably known to BritiBli naturaliBte by her ' Condiolo*
gist's Companion,' and by other works on Natural History. We expected to find in it
a useful and entertaining yolume. We have not been disappointed. . . . The work
is illustrated with eighteen plates, beautifully coloured — in most uutances affording a
view of the structure of the animal." Axbxssjul

43.
P. H. G-osse.

Popular British Ornithology ;

Containing a Familiar and Technical Description of the Birds of the
British Isles. By P. H. Gosse. Second Edition, In twelve chapters,
each being the ornithological lesson for the month. With 20 coloured
plates.

Royal 16mo, price 10<. 6^.

** To render the subject of ornithology clear, and its study attractlre, has been the
great aim of the author of this beautiful little volume. ... It is embellished by up-
wards of seventy figures of British birds beautifully coloured."

MoBirnra Hxbald.

MR. EBEVb's list OP PUBLICATIONS. 17

44.
Miss Catlow.

Drops of Water ;

Their marvellous and beautiful Inhabitants displayed by the Microscope.
By AGif ES Catlow. With 4 coloured plates.

Square 12mo, price 7^. 6^.

*' An elegant little book, both in the getting up and its literature. . . . The text
is accompanied by coloured plates that exhibit the most remarkable creatures of the
watery world." Spxctatok.

<* Of the manner in which this work is executed, we can say that, like Miss Catlow's
previous productions on natural history, it displays an accurate acquaintance with the

s microscope than the present i

ATHKMaSUM.

45.
Dr. Iiandsborou^, A.I1.S.

Popula/r History of British Zoophytes ;

By the Rev. D. Landsboeough, A.L.S., Member of the Wemerian
Society of Edinburgh. With 20 coloured plates.

Royal 16mo, price lOj. ^d.

" This work constitutes one of the popular series of scientific treatises which, from
the simplicity of their style, and the artistic excellence and correctness of their nu-
merous illustrations, has acquired a celebrity beyond that of any other series of modem
cheap works. With this manual of Zoophytes, and that upon Seaweeds by the same
author, the student can ramble along the sea-shores and glean knowledge from every
heap of tangled weed that lies in his pathway." Livbxpool Stamdabd.

18 MR. keeve's list of publications.

46.
Dr. Thomson, F.Ii.S.

Western Himalaya and Tibet;

The Narrative of a Journey through the Mountains of Northern India,
daring the Years 1847 and 1848. By Thomas Thomson, M.D., As-
sistant-Surgeon, Bengal Army. With Tinted Lithographs and a Map
hy Arrowsmith.

8vo, price 15*.

" Few more valuable Tolames of travels than this by Dr. Thomson have been for »
long time past published. Long after the interest which its novelty will create shaQ
have passed away, it will be a standard book of reference, on account of the valBsU
facts which it contains, and of the spirit of sound observation in which it is written."

AXBXBMVH-

47.
Dr. Gardner, F.I1.S.

Travels in the Interior of Brazil,

Principally through the Northern Provinces and the Gold and Diamon
Districts, during the Years 1836-41. By George Ga&dnek, M.D.
F.L.S. Second Edition, With PUte and Map.

8vo, price 12*.

" When camping out on the mountain-top or in the wilderness ; roughing it in his
long journey through the interior ; observing the very singular mode oflife there pre-
sented to his notice ; describing the curious characters that fell under his observa-
tion ; the arts or substitutes for arts of the people ; and the natural productions of the
country ;— these travels are full of attraction. The book, like the country it describes, is
full of new matter." Spbotatob.

"This volume Lb from the pen of an able naturalist, whose heart is hi his oceupatioD.
. . . Some of the regions he visited have seldom been trodden by Europeans — ^never
by Englishmen ; so that his observations derive value from tiUe novelty of the matter
to which they relate." AxHsviBuv.

MR. UEBVE^S LIST OF PUBLICATIONS. 19

48. '
A. B. 'WaUaoe.

Travels on the Amazon and JRio Negro^

With an Account of the Native Tribes, and Observations on the Cli-
mate, Geology, and Natural History of the Amazon Valley. By
Alpbed R. Wallace, Esq. With Remarks on the Vocabularies of
Amazonian Languages, by R. 6. Latham, M.D., F.R.S. With 6
plates and maps.

Royal 8vo, 18*.

" Mr. Wallace has given us a most lively and interesting picture of the glories of the
magnificent river. Venesuela, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia, and Braal, six migh^
States, spreading over an area far more extensive than Europe herself, contribute their
aid in forming the flood up which he toiled. For twenty-eight days consecutively he
breasted the stream of the Amason. ... He enters, with all the sest of a naturalist,
into the history of the living thin^ which fly, run, or creep over the surface of the
country. His sketches of the natives, their appearance, habits, and disposition, are
quite original." Bbitakkia.

*' In the novelbr of the scenery and mannors, in the truthful, albeit somewhat literal,
picture of what the traveller saw and felt, in the auiet earnestness by which obstacles
were surmounted by Talleyrand's favourite rule ox waiting, and in tiie patience with
which sickness, suffering, and privations were submitted to, ' Travels on the Amazon and
Rio Negro' remind us of the simplicity of the old voyagers." Spbotaxob.

49.
Dr. Seemaiin, F.I1.S.

Cwmmnavigation of the Globe ;

Being the Narrative of the Voyage of H.M.S. Herald, under the com-
mand of Captain Kellett, R.N., C.B., during the Years 1845-51.
By Berthold Seemann, F.L.S., Naturalist of the Expedition. With
Tinted Lithographs and a Map by Petermanu.
2 vols. 8vo, price 21*.

" With extensive knowledge in geography and its cognate sciences, Mr. Seemann
possesses a close and sober but vivid style, which expresses his ideas not only with
clearness, but animation." Spbotatob.

" Mr. Seemann is alwavs a lively and agreeable companion, and has the merit of di-
recting the attention of the general reader to applied Natural History rather tiian to
questions only interesting tothe student of pure science."

Gabdbitbbs' Chboiticlb.

20 MB. reeve's list op publications.

50.
J. Beete Jukes, F.G-.S.

Popular Physical Geology.

By J. Beete Jukes, F.G.S., President of tlie Geological Society of
Dublin. With 20 Landscape Views of Geological Scenery in Double-
Tinted Lithography.

Royal 16mo, price 10*. 6rf.

" Mr. Jnkes's ' Popular Physical Geology ' ia peculiarly remarkable for the skilM
treatment of his subject. The established &ct8 and ])rinciples of Greology are not onlv
presented with freshness, but so clearlv enforced and illustrated as to impress the mincl
of the student, while he Lb stimulated to observation by the facility with whidi be is
shown tiiat observation can be made." Spscta.tob.

" The illustrations to the work are of the most accurate as well as beautiinl cha-
racter, combining the skill of the artist with the knowledge of the geologist."

Obsbstu.

51,
O. H. J. Smith.

Pa^hs amd Plea%wre Grotmds ;

Or, Practical Notes on Country Residences, Villaa, Public Parks, and
Gardens. By Charles H. J. Smith, Landscape Gardener.

Crown 8vo, price 6*.

" Mr. Smith, who is a landscape gardener and garden architect of great ezpeiience,
has worked out his design with ability and judgment." CtLobk.

" The character of this publication is idtogether practical, from the opening faints
upon the house and offices, to the closing directions about the arboretum and the
pmetum." Spkctatob.

MR. reeve's list OF PUBLICATIONS. 21

52.
Ohandos Wren Hoskyns.

Talpa ; or^ the Chronicles of a Clwy Farm.

An Agricultural Fragment. £7 Chandos Ween Hosktns. New
and Cheaper Edition, with Frontispiece by Greorge Croikshank.

Fcp. 8vo, price 3*. 6rf.

'* The writer handles this subject in such a masterly manner— his style is so piquant,
as well as forcible, so scholarly, yet so racy,— his wit and his wisdom are so skilfiilly
blended— he has so cleverly worked out his motto, Ridentem dicere verumy by telling
the truth laughingly— that the reader finds himsdf irresistibly carried along, and he
and the book part not company until he has made himself master of the tale that he
has to unfold." Lbicbstkbshibb Mbbcubt.

*' This is a rare little volume. We don't know which to admire most, the author's
humour or his wisdom. He has set himself the task of illustrating, in an agreeable
manner, the evils of custom, prenudice, and feudalism, as they exist among agricul-
turists. It will create much laughter among the merry, and convey many a lesson to
the tiller of the soil. There are some very capital illustrations too embellishing the
volume." Eba.

** Cleverly written in a vein of pleasantry, the work perseveringly uproots the preju-
dice of the past, and demonstrates that scientific knowledge is an important element in
successful tillage." Luroouf Mbbcubt.

63.
Piscarius.

The Artificial Prod/uction of Fish.

By PiscAEius. Third Edition,

Price 1*.

'* The object of this little book is to make known the means by which fish of all
descriptions may be multiplied in rivers to an almost incalculable extent. . . . This
principle of increase Piscaniu has carried out by argument and experiment in his little
treatise, which, we think, is worthy the attention of the legislator, the country gentle-
man, and the dergyman ; for it shows how an immense addition may be made to the
people's food with scarcely any expense." Eba,

22 ira. beete's list of publications.

54.
Arthur Adams, F.Ii.8.

Zoology of the Voyage of H.M.8. Samarang,

Under the command of Captain Sir Edward Belcher, C.6., F.RA.S.,
during the Years 1843-46. Edited by Arthur Adams, F.L.S.

The Vertebrata, with 8 plates, by John Edward Gray, F.R.S.; the
Fishes, with 10 plates, by Sir John Bichardson, F.R.S. ; the Mollasea,
with 24 plates, by Arthur Adams, F.L.S., and LoveU Reeve, F.L.S.;
the Crustacea, with 13 plates, by Arthur Adams, F.L.S., and Adam
White, F.L.S.

Royal 4to, price £3. IOj. coloured.

55.
Sir John Bichardson.

Zoology of the Voyage of H.M.S. Herald,

Under the command of Captain Kellett, R.N., during the Years 1845-51.
By Sir J. Richardson. Edited by Professor Edward Forbes, F.R,S.
Published under the authority of the Lords Commissioners of the
Admiralty.

Part I. Fossil Mammals, 15 double plates.
Royal 4to, 21j.

Part II. Fossil Mammals, 10 plates.
Royal 4to, 10*. 6rf.

Part III. Reptiles and Fish, 10 plates.
Royal 4to, 10*. ^d.

ME. EEEVe's list OF PUBLICATIONS* 23

56.
Miss M. E. Catlow.

Popular Scriptwre Zoology ;

Containing a Familiar History of the Animals mentioned in the Bihle.
By Maeia E. Catlow. With 16 coloured plates.
Royal 16mo, price 10«. 6^.

" It contains a short and clear account of the animals mentioned in the Bible, classed
according to their genera, and illustrated by a number of well-executed and characteristic
coloured plates. It is a seasonable addition to a very nice set of books."

GuAXSiAir.

*' Miss Catlow's abilities as a naturalist, and her tact in popularising any subject
she undertakes, are too well known to need reiteration on this occasion."

NOTBS Aim QUBBXXS.

67.

B. J. Mann.

The Planetary and Stellar Universe.

A Series of Lectures. By Robert James Mann.

12mo, price 5«.

'* A brief abstract of the discoveries of Newton, clearly explained and ele^ntly illus-
trated." Wbstminpteb awo FoBBioir Quabtsbly Ueyibw.

58.
n. Edwards, LL.D.

Illustrations of the Wisdom and Benevolence

of the Deity t as manifested in Nature. By H. Edwabds, LL.D.

16mo, price 2s. Qd.

" A little excursion in the track of Paley and the broad road of the Bridgewater'
Treatises. Animals, Atmosphere, Organic Matter, Li^ht, and Electricity are the na-
tural elements out of which the author deduces his pious lessons, leading to a First
Cause in wonder, admiration, and worship." Litbbaby G-azbttb.

PBEPABINa FOB PUBIiICATION.

Popular British Arcfueology,
By the Rev. C. Boutell, M.A.

Flora Tasmanica :

A History of the Plants of Van Diemen's Land ; being the coocludioi
portion of the ' Flora Antarctica/ By Dr. J. D. Hookee, F.R.S.

[_Part I. now readf

Insecta Britannica.

Vol. IV. Diptera, Vol. III. By Francis Walker, F.L.S.

Popular Garden Botany,

Vol. II., Greenhonse Plants. By Agnes Catlow.

Popular History of British Fossils,
By Professor Wyville Thomson.

Popular History of British Fishes.

. By the Rev. J. Longmuir.

Popular History of British Lichens.

By Dr. Lauder Lindset. . o jti)

Popular History of British Crustacea.
By Adam White, F.L.S.

Popular History of the Water Vivarium.

By G. B. SowERBT, F.L.S.

I